Alas, the circle of the time on the wheel of life reaches again into spring, and the colors are everpresent. Wouldn't it be nice to think that the world is a safe and healthy place upon with to live. Unfortunately we can't think that. It is not safe, nor healthy. As the planet's water and air become more and more toxic, humans, who live quite literally at the very pinnacle of the food chain absorb these toxins, concentrating their inherent evil. WE become more violent, more hatefilled, more vicious, more desperate. Across the US, children are increasingly exhibiting all the signs and symptoms of absorbed hazmats. ADD/ADHD, Aspergers, OCD, OOD, BD, HD, DD, and so many more acronyms that describe nothing so much more than that the best and brightest of our future live in environments that are increasingly damaging to well being and harmonious human interrelations.
And what do our leaders wish to do about it. Excise themselves from it, hoarding as much of the available wealth they can create with the most heinous and vile regressive economic policies. Collecting this wealth from increasing profitability of corporations that take keep more than $11.5 trillion offshore protected in various accounts and financial instruments, waiting for the moment of collapse when they can arrange their rides to secret places built of security contractors invested in the protection of this wealth. They have chosen to leave the mass of the world's population to fend for itself, supporting religious fundamentalisms across all spectra of life. These then become the breeders for the future of mass murder and genocidal violence. Spawn of the evil, will spawn more until all that is left is a burnt crispy planet, upon which, hidden in their little biodomes and biospheres, the rich will live out their days protected from one another by armies of ever weakening strengths until the last few vestiges of humanity decide that nuking them all is the final solution, the last option.
The beauty of the natural world struggling against all of this is heartening, knowing that once the blip of human activities has subsided into the bowels of stones and sticks, GAIA can recreate herself again, spinning in circles of time around the wheel of life...
You have discovered arachnoanarchy
otter clan omarian otter oasis
Saturday, April 30, 2005
Friday, April 29, 2005
not in my own words.. but share full sentiments
Jason Miller writes:
From a young age, American society bludgeons the individuality out of us. The natural human instinct to self actualize through finding a deep-seated sense of self and sense of purpose is shunted by Madison Avenue, think tanks, political propaganda, government-manipulated mainstream media, churches that manipulate through fear, and a patriarchal system that continues to ensure the dominance of white males...
The world has entered a dark age. America represents a significant blight on humanity's well-being. The current administration's insatiable desire to spend money it does not have, and incur massive debt, has placed the world economy on a precipice. America is becoming a debtor nation, beholden to its lenders, not unlike the so-called "Third World", developing countries, which the United States views with such condescension. Despite its scandals, the United Nations represents a unifying body that could potentially offer solutions to many of the world's problems involving poverty, war, and natural disasters, if it was properly managed. Yet if this administration has its way, the UN will be little more than a puppet to further American imperialistic interests. America is involved in an illegal, imperialistic war in Iraq, and a potentially "never-ending" war which Bush has launched against terrorists, a nameless, faceless enemy with whom we can engage as long as it fills the military-industrial complexes coffers. For them, the beauty of it is that it does not matter whether any more terrorists exist or not because there it will be virtually impossible to prove that they have been extinguished. Bush and his followers have created the real judicial crisis in America as they are attempting to railroad several unfit candidates onto the federal bench, are attempting to do away with the filibuster in the Senate, and have created and endorsed attacks and threats on the judiciary. Bush and the Religious Right both have an irrational resolve to severely cripple the judiciary because it is the only remaining significant check on their power. Since stocking the judiciary with "their people" was not effective, their new plan is to render it impotent. America's Religious Right mirrors the dogmatic followers of Islam in the Middle East, and is garnering the political power to convert our republic into a theocracy. Many of these events have unfolded because people have been beguiled by the propaganda of Karl Rove and the Religious Right, or because their obsession with attaining the "American dream" of "success" has kept them too occupied to be aware of what these schemers have been doing.
As if this weren't true enough, on the same day Joe Baegent writes:
Every person there seemed to understand and acknowledge the coming global human "die-off." The one that has already begun in places like Africa and will grow into a global event sometime within our lifetimes and/or those of our children. The one that will kill millions of white people. That's right, clean pink little Western World white people like you and me. Nobody in the U.S. seems to be able to deal with or even think about this near certainty, and the few who do are written off as nutcases by the media and the public. Mostly though, it goes unacknowledged. All of which drives me nuts because the now nearly visible end of civilization strikes me as worthy of at least modest discussion. You'd think so.
Here's the short course: Global die-off of mankind will occur when we run out of energy to support the complex technological grid sustaining modern industrial human civilization. In other words, when the electricity goes out, we are back in the Dark Age, with the Stone Age grunting at us from just around the corner. This will likely happen in 100 years or less, assuming the ecosystem does not collapse first. And you are thinking, "Well ho ho ho! Any other good news Bageant? And how the fock do you know this anyway?"
For those willing to contemplate the subject, there is a scientifically supported model of the timeline of our return to Stone Age tribal units. A roadmap to the day when we will be cutting up dog meat with a sharpened cd rom disc in some toxic future canyon. It is called the Olduvai Theory.
The *Olduvai theory was first introduced in a scientific paper by petroleum geologist/engineer/anthropologist Richard C. Duncan titled The Peak Of World Oil Production And The Road To The Olduvai Gorge. Duncan ("Dunk") chose the name Olduvai because, among other reasons, "...it is a good metaphor for the Stone Age way of life." It also sounded cool, he confesses. The Olduvai Gorge is a deep cleft in the Serengeti steppe of Tanzania, where Louis and Mary Leakey found the remains of prehistoric hominids, some up to two million years old... Dunk says "the Olduvai way of life was and still is a sustainable one --- local, tribal, and solar --- and, for better or worse, our ancestors practiced it for millions of years."
Dunk's Olduvai theory provides a modern database support structure for the Malthusian argument. The Olduvai theory uses only a single metric, as defined by "White's Law," and deals with electricity as the most vital expression of other forms of energy such as crude oil or coal. The theory is an inductive one based on world energy and population data, so elegantly simple that any 12th grader can do it, assuming he or she can do multiplication (a risky assumption now that no child has been left behind by our great ownership society.) In the Olduvai schema permanent blackouts will occur worldwide around 2030. Industrial Civilization ends when energy availability falls to its 1930 level. Measured as energy use---energy expended or consumed---our industrial civilization can be described as a one-time phenomenon, a single pulse waveform of limited duration which flashed out from the caves to outer space, then back to the caves over approximately 100 years.
So when was the highpoint of the flash? On the average, world per capita energy-use crested around 1977. That was the same year John Travolta made "Saturday Night Fever," which few of us consider much of a highpoint. To make a long story short, there are three intervals of decline in the Olduvai schema: slope, slide and cliff -- each steeper than the previous. After more than a decade no scientist has been able to refute it and even given the flexibility and bias inherent in what passes for common sense in this country, it's still pretty damned hard to argue with.
When we do go off the cliff, the Big Die-off will play no favorites, and will happen everywhere more or less simultaneously. But there are some particularly lousy places to be when permanent worldwide electrical blackouts happen. In or near a big city is the worst. You can imagine the, uh, "discomfort" of billions when the electrical grids die and power goes out across the densely packed high-rise buildings surrounded by a million acres of asphalt. People with no work, no heat, no air conditioning, no food, no water. Put on yer Adidas, it is migration time. Wherein bankers, skinheads, little old ladies and taxi drivers swarm like insects toward whatever passes for the countryside by then. Looks like all those survivalists up in North Idaho and Oregon may be right. Personally, I wouldn't want to be in New York or Bombay, or even Toledo when the deal goes down, and in fact want to be as distant from a city as one can get without having to be too far into the woods (of which there will de damned few) to eat my daily requirement of tree bark.
Americans busily expanding their lard content to fit the contours of their air-conditioned SUVs are among the chief accelerators of the Big Die-off. However, people worldwide assume that the average American is a blind dickhead who wouldn't acknowledge the ecological price of his/her lifestyle if it were branded on their forehead. That assumption is correct. Americans for the most part don't give a twit what kind of world their own children inherit, muchless about dolphins, Hottentots, Frenchmen and the approaching desertification of distant places like Kansas.
Still, it is reasonable to believe that many powerful people and organizations with all the research capability in the world at their fingertips must understand the future before us. In fact, I am sure some in industry do because even 10 years ago when I used to deal with chemical executives at Monsanto, Zeneca, Dow and other corporations, it was discussed and acknowledged a couple of times over cocktails, and even discussed how to profit from it through genetically engineered non-reproducing seeds that eliminate all the native crops around them. One might also guess that the U.S. president and his cabinet know, and that their solution is to fight for more oil and higher profits, given its increasing scarcity. Even the superficial whoring media is broaching the topic of "peak oil," though mostly for shock entertainment value.
Shut up and watch Survivor!
Well hell then. What does keep the American people from looking around them and seeing the obvious? That the earth is a finite thing being used up at exponential rates? Answer: The Spectacle. American capitalism's "media hologram." We no longer have a country, but the artificial spectacle of one. We have a global corporation masquerading electronically, digitally, financially, and legally and every other way as a nation called the "United States of America." The corporation now animates most of us from within through management of the need hierarchy of goods and information. We no longer have citizens. We have consumers, "purchase decision makers" whose most influential act in life consists of choosing a mortgage banker and an NFL team. And a car. The majority of modernized technical humans, Digitus Cathodus Americanus, cannot perceive the hologram because their self-identities were generated by it. It's "reality" to them---the only one they will know until the hologram collapses with their electrical industrial civilization.
By design or not, the hologram's primary effect has been to induce the illusion of a national "value system" through hypnotic repetition of images. Thus profit seeking enterprises are legitimized as the animating spirit of our identities as individuals and as a nation. The end result of course is the mass replication of millions of uniform "market segmented consumer identities." Individuality is circumscribed by brand identification. The overall aggregate of brand identification groups is interpreted to be an inherently superior race or nation (worth fighting for to expand the resource base and markets.) We no longer have lives, just lifestyles which are defined and expressed through ever expanding (and more profitable) consumption.
Net result: The legions of humanity toil to generate the trucks and tofu, munitions, missiles, newspapers, petrochemicals and pizza and millions of tons of ground up cattle sold to fire the furnace of an economic engine that has taken on a life of its own. One that must grow exponentially, devouring everything just to survive. Just to keep from collapsing. And people are taught that it is called "human progress."
This mass hallucination generated by this totalist capitalist system, the state as engine of profit, is one thing. Life on a real planet made of dirt and water and flesh both warm and cold blooded is quite another. Viewed from outside the web of Western illusions, say, an Iraqi citizen or a Filipino Moro, one finds the economic engine to be driven by unseen death and war and the pillaging of the weak by the powerful. All this is set against the backdrop of explosive human disease, growing starvation, the impending failure of the environment and petroleum based civilization, resulting in the greatest mass extinction event in the history of this planet. The Big Die-off. And in your very lifetime too. Admission is not only free, it is compulsory.
One of the hologram's great illusions is that Industrial Civilization is evolutionary---that it advances forever. Industrial civilization does not evolve. In the overall history of man it is extremely short and completely unsustainable. It is a one-time biological drama that rapidly consumes the necessary physical prerequisites for its own existence, the ecology and resources of the planetary gravity well in which it is trapped. Any good news, for Chrissake?
Sort of. We may not become completely extinct. It looks like the earth's immune system is beginning to shake off its infection by the human virus through what appears---to we virus at least---as environmental collapse. But for the sake of discussion, let's assume that extinction through nuclear war and ecological collapse is somehow avoided (nowadays, we're allowed to assume anything we want, regardless of the evidence around us. Just ask any U.S. capitalist free market economist.) If what is left after the Big Die-off can still be called a human society, it will be bottomed out at the subsistence level of energy-use. Now that is one ugly booger of a notion to contemplate. What is subsistence level energy-use? In all likelihood it has to do with shitting in the winter darkness at a sustainable 45 indoor degrees. Meanwhile, a cockroach watches, thinking to himself, "What a shame, because at the height of their culture these guys made a damned good peanut butter sandwich."
Your attention please. This is your pilot. We have crested in our evolutionary journey and are beginning our descent. Please lock your folding trays, put you seats in an upright position and enjoy the landing. (Captain! Why are there no lights down there at the airport?) It was a helluva crest, that spurt of technological jism by the industrial state toward outer space and impregnation of the moon. What with Neil Armstrong bouncing around in the lunar dust in his high tech Pillsbury doughboy outfit and all, it added up to about one week of attention by the masses and a lot of dough for government contractors. But as one who within my lifetime witnessed the entire evolution of the space program, and its accompanying nationalistic hoopla about beating the Russians at being to first to fart in the vacuum of space, I am somehow unconvinced it was worth it. I dunno. Maybe my wife is right, Maybe I'm just a goddam crab. Maybe I'm a little resentful because, thanks to the big American suckdown of the planet, I will never have grandchildren. My kids are among that portion of their generation who understand what their lifetimes hold and are not remotely interested in adding to the problem.
We weren't always like that. Right after World War II and the advent of the atomic bomb a majority of Americans (67% of those surveyed by Gallup) wanted a cooperative one world government with all nuclear weapons put under the control of the United Nations. Now you cannot get an American to turn of a light switch to save human civilization. As a friend from Cape Verde once remarked, "Just watching Americans consume things gives me a headache."
From a young age, American society bludgeons the individuality out of us. The natural human instinct to self actualize through finding a deep-seated sense of self and sense of purpose is shunted by Madison Avenue, think tanks, political propaganda, government-manipulated mainstream media, churches that manipulate through fear, and a patriarchal system that continues to ensure the dominance of white males...
The world has entered a dark age. America represents a significant blight on humanity's well-being. The current administration's insatiable desire to spend money it does not have, and incur massive debt, has placed the world economy on a precipice. America is becoming a debtor nation, beholden to its lenders, not unlike the so-called "Third World", developing countries, which the United States views with such condescension. Despite its scandals, the United Nations represents a unifying body that could potentially offer solutions to many of the world's problems involving poverty, war, and natural disasters, if it was properly managed. Yet if this administration has its way, the UN will be little more than a puppet to further American imperialistic interests. America is involved in an illegal, imperialistic war in Iraq, and a potentially "never-ending" war which Bush has launched against terrorists, a nameless, faceless enemy with whom we can engage as long as it fills the military-industrial complexes coffers. For them, the beauty of it is that it does not matter whether any more terrorists exist or not because there it will be virtually impossible to prove that they have been extinguished. Bush and his followers have created the real judicial crisis in America as they are attempting to railroad several unfit candidates onto the federal bench, are attempting to do away with the filibuster in the Senate, and have created and endorsed attacks and threats on the judiciary. Bush and the Religious Right both have an irrational resolve to severely cripple the judiciary because it is the only remaining significant check on their power. Since stocking the judiciary with "their people" was not effective, their new plan is to render it impotent. America's Religious Right mirrors the dogmatic followers of Islam in the Middle East, and is garnering the political power to convert our republic into a theocracy. Many of these events have unfolded because people have been beguiled by the propaganda of Karl Rove and the Religious Right, or because their obsession with attaining the "American dream" of "success" has kept them too occupied to be aware of what these schemers have been doing.
As if this weren't true enough, on the same day Joe Baegent writes:
Every person there seemed to understand and acknowledge the coming global human "die-off." The one that has already begun in places like Africa and will grow into a global event sometime within our lifetimes and/or those of our children. The one that will kill millions of white people. That's right, clean pink little Western World white people like you and me. Nobody in the U.S. seems to be able to deal with or even think about this near certainty, and the few who do are written off as nutcases by the media and the public. Mostly though, it goes unacknowledged. All of which drives me nuts because the now nearly visible end of civilization strikes me as worthy of at least modest discussion. You'd think so.
Here's the short course: Global die-off of mankind will occur when we run out of energy to support the complex technological grid sustaining modern industrial human civilization. In other words, when the electricity goes out, we are back in the Dark Age, with the Stone Age grunting at us from just around the corner. This will likely happen in 100 years or less, assuming the ecosystem does not collapse first. And you are thinking, "Well ho ho ho! Any other good news Bageant? And how the fock do you know this anyway?"
For those willing to contemplate the subject, there is a scientifically supported model of the timeline of our return to Stone Age tribal units. A roadmap to the day when we will be cutting up dog meat with a sharpened cd rom disc in some toxic future canyon. It is called the Olduvai Theory.
The *Olduvai theory was first introduced in a scientific paper by petroleum geologist/engineer/anthropologist Richard C. Duncan titled The Peak Of World Oil Production And The Road To The Olduvai Gorge. Duncan ("Dunk") chose the name Olduvai because, among other reasons, "...it is a good metaphor for the Stone Age way of life." It also sounded cool, he confesses. The Olduvai Gorge is a deep cleft in the Serengeti steppe of Tanzania, where Louis and Mary Leakey found the remains of prehistoric hominids, some up to two million years old... Dunk says "the Olduvai way of life was and still is a sustainable one --- local, tribal, and solar --- and, for better or worse, our ancestors practiced it for millions of years."
Dunk's Olduvai theory provides a modern database support structure for the Malthusian argument. The Olduvai theory uses only a single metric, as defined by "White's Law," and deals with electricity as the most vital expression of other forms of energy such as crude oil or coal. The theory is an inductive one based on world energy and population data, so elegantly simple that any 12th grader can do it, assuming he or she can do multiplication (a risky assumption now that no child has been left behind by our great ownership society.) In the Olduvai schema permanent blackouts will occur worldwide around 2030. Industrial Civilization ends when energy availability falls to its 1930 level. Measured as energy use---energy expended or consumed---our industrial civilization can be described as a one-time phenomenon, a single pulse waveform of limited duration which flashed out from the caves to outer space, then back to the caves over approximately 100 years.
So when was the highpoint of the flash? On the average, world per capita energy-use crested around 1977. That was the same year John Travolta made "Saturday Night Fever," which few of us consider much of a highpoint. To make a long story short, there are three intervals of decline in the Olduvai schema: slope, slide and cliff -- each steeper than the previous. After more than a decade no scientist has been able to refute it and even given the flexibility and bias inherent in what passes for common sense in this country, it's still pretty damned hard to argue with.
When we do go off the cliff, the Big Die-off will play no favorites, and will happen everywhere more or less simultaneously. But there are some particularly lousy places to be when permanent worldwide electrical blackouts happen. In or near a big city is the worst. You can imagine the, uh, "discomfort" of billions when the electrical grids die and power goes out across the densely packed high-rise buildings surrounded by a million acres of asphalt. People with no work, no heat, no air conditioning, no food, no water. Put on yer Adidas, it is migration time. Wherein bankers, skinheads, little old ladies and taxi drivers swarm like insects toward whatever passes for the countryside by then. Looks like all those survivalists up in North Idaho and Oregon may be right. Personally, I wouldn't want to be in New York or Bombay, or even Toledo when the deal goes down, and in fact want to be as distant from a city as one can get without having to be too far into the woods (of which there will de damned few) to eat my daily requirement of tree bark.
Americans busily expanding their lard content to fit the contours of their air-conditioned SUVs are among the chief accelerators of the Big Die-off. However, people worldwide assume that the average American is a blind dickhead who wouldn't acknowledge the ecological price of his/her lifestyle if it were branded on their forehead. That assumption is correct. Americans for the most part don't give a twit what kind of world their own children inherit, muchless about dolphins, Hottentots, Frenchmen and the approaching desertification of distant places like Kansas.
Still, it is reasonable to believe that many powerful people and organizations with all the research capability in the world at their fingertips must understand the future before us. In fact, I am sure some in industry do because even 10 years ago when I used to deal with chemical executives at Monsanto, Zeneca, Dow and other corporations, it was discussed and acknowledged a couple of times over cocktails, and even discussed how to profit from it through genetically engineered non-reproducing seeds that eliminate all the native crops around them. One might also guess that the U.S. president and his cabinet know, and that their solution is to fight for more oil and higher profits, given its increasing scarcity. Even the superficial whoring media is broaching the topic of "peak oil," though mostly for shock entertainment value.
Shut up and watch Survivor!
Well hell then. What does keep the American people from looking around them and seeing the obvious? That the earth is a finite thing being used up at exponential rates? Answer: The Spectacle. American capitalism's "media hologram." We no longer have a country, but the artificial spectacle of one. We have a global corporation masquerading electronically, digitally, financially, and legally and every other way as a nation called the "United States of America." The corporation now animates most of us from within through management of the need hierarchy of goods and information. We no longer have citizens. We have consumers, "purchase decision makers" whose most influential act in life consists of choosing a mortgage banker and an NFL team. And a car. The majority of modernized technical humans, Digitus Cathodus Americanus, cannot perceive the hologram because their self-identities were generated by it. It's "reality" to them---the only one they will know until the hologram collapses with their electrical industrial civilization.
By design or not, the hologram's primary effect has been to induce the illusion of a national "value system" through hypnotic repetition of images. Thus profit seeking enterprises are legitimized as the animating spirit of our identities as individuals and as a nation. The end result of course is the mass replication of millions of uniform "market segmented consumer identities." Individuality is circumscribed by brand identification. The overall aggregate of brand identification groups is interpreted to be an inherently superior race or nation (worth fighting for to expand the resource base and markets.) We no longer have lives, just lifestyles which are defined and expressed through ever expanding (and more profitable) consumption.
Net result: The legions of humanity toil to generate the trucks and tofu, munitions, missiles, newspapers, petrochemicals and pizza and millions of tons of ground up cattle sold to fire the furnace of an economic engine that has taken on a life of its own. One that must grow exponentially, devouring everything just to survive. Just to keep from collapsing. And people are taught that it is called "human progress."
This mass hallucination generated by this totalist capitalist system, the state as engine of profit, is one thing. Life on a real planet made of dirt and water and flesh both warm and cold blooded is quite another. Viewed from outside the web of Western illusions, say, an Iraqi citizen or a Filipino Moro, one finds the economic engine to be driven by unseen death and war and the pillaging of the weak by the powerful. All this is set against the backdrop of explosive human disease, growing starvation, the impending failure of the environment and petroleum based civilization, resulting in the greatest mass extinction event in the history of this planet. The Big Die-off. And in your very lifetime too. Admission is not only free, it is compulsory.
One of the hologram's great illusions is that Industrial Civilization is evolutionary---that it advances forever. Industrial civilization does not evolve. In the overall history of man it is extremely short and completely unsustainable. It is a one-time biological drama that rapidly consumes the necessary physical prerequisites for its own existence, the ecology and resources of the planetary gravity well in which it is trapped. Any good news, for Chrissake?
Sort of. We may not become completely extinct. It looks like the earth's immune system is beginning to shake off its infection by the human virus through what appears---to we virus at least---as environmental collapse. But for the sake of discussion, let's assume that extinction through nuclear war and ecological collapse is somehow avoided (nowadays, we're allowed to assume anything we want, regardless of the evidence around us. Just ask any U.S. capitalist free market economist.) If what is left after the Big Die-off can still be called a human society, it will be bottomed out at the subsistence level of energy-use. Now that is one ugly booger of a notion to contemplate. What is subsistence level energy-use? In all likelihood it has to do with shitting in the winter darkness at a sustainable 45 indoor degrees. Meanwhile, a cockroach watches, thinking to himself, "What a shame, because at the height of their culture these guys made a damned good peanut butter sandwich."
Your attention please. This is your pilot. We have crested in our evolutionary journey and are beginning our descent. Please lock your folding trays, put you seats in an upright position and enjoy the landing. (Captain! Why are there no lights down there at the airport?) It was a helluva crest, that spurt of technological jism by the industrial state toward outer space and impregnation of the moon. What with Neil Armstrong bouncing around in the lunar dust in his high tech Pillsbury doughboy outfit and all, it added up to about one week of attention by the masses and a lot of dough for government contractors. But as one who within my lifetime witnessed the entire evolution of the space program, and its accompanying nationalistic hoopla about beating the Russians at being to first to fart in the vacuum of space, I am somehow unconvinced it was worth it. I dunno. Maybe my wife is right, Maybe I'm just a goddam crab. Maybe I'm a little resentful because, thanks to the big American suckdown of the planet, I will never have grandchildren. My kids are among that portion of their generation who understand what their lifetimes hold and are not remotely interested in adding to the problem.
We weren't always like that. Right after World War II and the advent of the atomic bomb a majority of Americans (67% of those surveyed by Gallup) wanted a cooperative one world government with all nuclear weapons put under the control of the United Nations. Now you cannot get an American to turn of a light switch to save human civilization. As a friend from Cape Verde once remarked, "Just watching Americans consume things gives me a headache."
Thursday, April 28, 2005
lo wa `cin
A Swedish diplomat to the EU community legislative convocation described the US attitude towards the environment as follows: "The US is inclined to fatten the banker's golden goose at the expense of filling the rivers with poisoned fish!"
I love the metaphoric drifts behind this comment. Indeed that is a most apt description of the US GOP attitude towards the environment. We feed the golden goose to lay golden eggs for the scions of the bankers and associates, while we poison the air and water. We encourage the children of the bankers to increase the golden egg production(repeal estate taxes, void environmental laws, lower taxes on wealth, etc.) while we teach the mass of the children who will never have access to the golden eggs to fish. Of course we never tell them that the fish are going to kill them. We teach the mass of the non-egg receiving children to work hard and if they do so they will maybe get a golden egg before they die; of course we teach them this by teaching them to gamble, so that they don't realize that the odds are always stacked against them(98% return on all slot machines). Interestingly, the bankers have been deluded as well into believing that they can eat the golden eggs, failing to realize that the golden eggs had to be cracked open and broken into little pieces and distributed to the mass of children to get fish to eat. Thus, by their own insulation from reality, the children of the golden geese will likewise become poisoned. AAAhh ignorance is such bliss.
I love the metaphoric drifts behind this comment. Indeed that is a most apt description of the US GOP attitude towards the environment. We feed the golden goose to lay golden eggs for the scions of the bankers and associates, while we poison the air and water. We encourage the children of the bankers to increase the golden egg production(repeal estate taxes, void environmental laws, lower taxes on wealth, etc.) while we teach the mass of the children who will never have access to the golden eggs to fish. Of course we never tell them that the fish are going to kill them. We teach the mass of the non-egg receiving children to work hard and if they do so they will maybe get a golden egg before they die; of course we teach them this by teaching them to gamble, so that they don't realize that the odds are always stacked against them(98% return on all slot machines). Interestingly, the bankers have been deluded as well into believing that they can eat the golden eggs, failing to realize that the golden eggs had to be cracked open and broken into little pieces and distributed to the mass of children to get fish to eat. Thus, by their own insulation from reality, the children of the golden geese will likewise become poisoned. AAAhh ignorance is such bliss.
Tuesday, April 26, 2005
Tohanl yagli kta he? kona kte yeyapi
CBS/AP) American soldiers who shot and killed an Italian intelligence officer in a friendly fire incident in Baghdad generally followed instructions for dealing with potential threats, a U.S. investigation is expected to conclude. But the probe into the March 4 shooting is also expected to raise concerns about the rules of engagement at a Baghdad checkpoint, a senior U.S. defense official said Monday. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the report has not been finished.
hehe: generally followed instructions??? I wonder what would happen to students in school when they are taking the standardized tests for the NCLB formula scoring that determines the funding and sanctions for their school if they just 'generally followed instructions'??? What if people driving on the Interstate highway system just generally followed the rules and regulations?? How bad would it be if rather than actually reading the instructions, a taxpayer filing their annual 1040 sort of generally followed the instructions? Would there be consequences for all of these actions??? Would there need to be a followup and reorganization and insuring heads would role if generally following the instructions led to loss of school funding, traffic accidents, hugely inappropriate tax filings?? NO, no one would care, because everyone was generally following instructions just as those in our military were doing when they shot to death an unarmed group of people in a car travelling away from them on a road we totally controlled and knew who these people were.
hehe: generally followed instructions??? I wonder what would happen to students in school when they are taking the standardized tests for the NCLB formula scoring that determines the funding and sanctions for their school if they just 'generally followed instructions'??? What if people driving on the Interstate highway system just generally followed the rules and regulations?? How bad would it be if rather than actually reading the instructions, a taxpayer filing their annual 1040 sort of generally followed the instructions? Would there be consequences for all of these actions??? Would there need to be a followup and reorganization and insuring heads would role if generally following the instructions led to loss of school funding, traffic accidents, hugely inappropriate tax filings?? NO, no one would care, because everyone was generally following instructions just as those in our military were doing when they shot to death an unarmed group of people in a car travelling away from them on a road we totally controlled and knew who these people were.
Monday, April 25, 2005
the Texas Taliban are taking control
I am a church-going, Bible-believing Baptist, but I recently learned that I'm not a Christian. Indeed, I've not only learned that I'm not a Christian, I've also learned that I'm anti-Christian and hostile to religion. Why? Because I dare to disagree with a certain political and legal agenda.
<>The press release for the event states that certain judicial nominees are being opposed "because they are people of faith and moral conviction." It labels a broad range of court decisions as "liberal, anti-Christian dogma," claiming that "activist courts ... have been quietly working under the veil of the judiciary, like thieves in the night, to rob us of our Christian heritage and our religious freedoms." In sum, the release says that "we must stop this unprecedented filibuster of people of faith."... according to supporters of this agenda, including one of the foremost leaders in Congress, anyone who has a different view of the Constitution is an advocate of "liberal, anti-Christian dogma." Anyone who takes a contrary position on Senate rules of procedure is hostile to faith. End of story.
It's time to tell the truth.
There is no "filibuster against people of faith." Religious people are on both sides of the debate about the filibuster and certain Bush-nominated judges. And it's wrong for one of the country's foremost political leaders to lend legitimacy to a contrary notion. Just as no one should have to pass a religious test in order to hold political office, no one should have to pass a political test in order to claim religion or morality.
it would be improper to oppose judges because of their faith, but it is legitimate for senators to inquire about a judge's constitutional philosophy and ability to follow settled law, whatever his or her personal opinion. And surely reasonable minds can agree that something is seriously awry when a non-Catholic senator, Alabama Republican Jeff Sessions, lectures Catholic senators about Catholic doctrine during a hearing on judicial nominations.
Melissa Rogers is a visiting professor of religion and public policy at Wake Forest University Divinity School.
Saturday, April 23, 2005
fascism in a walnut shell
Ill., April 22 - Scores of African-American and Hispanic students at a small Evangelical Christian college here missed classes and were set to spend a second night in seclusion on Friday, after a series of threatening racist letters spurred their evacuation from the campus. Officials at Trinity International University, a conservative Bible-based school headquartered in this village 30 miles north of Chicago, said three students, two of them black and one Hispanic, had received hate-filled handwritten notes through the campus mail over two weeks.
<>The officials said they urged nearly 200 minority undergraduates to leave their dormitories after the third letter arrived on Thursday because it included growing threats of violence and was sent within days of the anniversaries of the Columbine school shooting in Colorado, the Oklahoma City bombing and Hitler's birth. It was not clear when, or if, the black and Hispanic students would return. The university president, Gregory L. Waybright, said they would be able to complete their academic work for the year. Mr. Waybright said Trinity embraced racial diversity but could not shield itself from the ugliness of an "imperfect world."This is a conservative christian institution of higher education!!! This is the US. This is where all the priorities are skewed towards the most vile and vicious evils incarnate. It is really difficult to call this anything other than cannibalism. Attack the core constituency of the deeply faithful for their being inferiorly bred subhumans. Yes indeed, compassionate conservatism in its christian finest. I do believe god is blessing the USA./
Friday, April 22, 2005
How can a country survive with so much hate?
More than 200 e-mails poured into The Star after Michael D. Smith, a 54-year-old Vietnam veteran from Gladstone, sent a stream of tobacco juice at the actress at a Plaza book signing Tuesday. Dozens expressed dismay. Many more, delight. “Spitting in Jane Fonda's face is every Vietnam vet's fantasy,” wrote a Phoenix man. “Bravo, Michael Smith. Bravo.” “Heartfelt thanks.” “Freedom of speech.” “Made my day.” “What a true American this man is!” There were bashers, too: “A Neanderthal.” “No sense of decency.” “Pathetic incident.” Still, fans of the spitter, from California to Cape Cod, appeared to outnumber those who condemned his action by about 3-to-1. The vitriol stems from Fonda's anti-war activities, particularly a 1972 visit to North Vietnam, where she was photographed at an anti-aircraft battery and visited American POWs, who she claimed were well-treated. She has never been forgiven. That anger over a war 30 years ago, which also surfaced in the 2004 presidential election, puzzles some. “Most of us who served in Vietnam have long ago resolved our issues of pain and blame and have gotten on with our lives,” said one e-mail signed by three Army veterans. But other vets, their spouses, mothers and daughters disagreed. One young GI fighting today's battles sent an e-mail from Fallujah, Iraq, congratulating Smith. Some said he should get the Medal of Honor; one suggested naming him citizen of the year. Thirty-two offered to cover his bail on the disorderly conduct charge. (Smith, who was jailed briefly Tuesday night, has said he will plead guilty. Fonda declined to press assault charges.)
“I got hundreds of letters from people — Vietnam vets, their families — all just furious. It lasted for a year and a half!” Snow said. “All of this because she climbed up onto that anti-aircraft gun. I think it has come to summarize all the frustrations of soldiers who served in that war.”
One well-circulated account of Fonda's trip involves her supposedly turning over to a North Vietnamese officer a fistful of messages given to her by American prisoners of war. But the story is folklore, Snow said, despite Internet versions that cite the allegations of a surviving POW named Col. Larry Carrigan.
“There is a real Colonel Carrigan, and he was a POW in Vietnam,” Snow wrote in a magazine column in late 2001. “But he has never met Jane Fonda, and he has no idea how the maddening tale attached itself to him.”
That message certainly has not reached many who recounted the story in their e-mail praise of Smith.
“Good for Mr. Smith. Jane Fonda is a traitor –– who aided and abetted the enemy at a time of war,” vented a Vietnam pilot. “She should be stood up against a wall and shot.”
Randy Barnett, a member of the Kansas City chapter of Vietnam Veterans of America, said the group had gotten about two dozen calls prior to Fonda's appearance in Kansas City, all looking to organize a protest. After the spitting incident, Barnett, said nearly as many veterans called offering to help pay any fine levied against Smith.
Barnett said the veterans group, which avoids political activity, passed on both counts.
“People need to stop thinking about what happened 35 years ago and spend time calling their congressmen and senators to protect veterans' benefits,” Barnett said. “All (Smith) did was give her a lot of free advertisement and sell a lot of her books.”
Fonda's activities beyond war protesting may also feed into support for the man who spat on her, said Hamilton Cravens, an Iowa State University professor of history and culture.
“I think some of it is that she is so liberated,” Cravens said. “All these women are more assertive now than when her father (Henry Fonda) was a kind of unassuming, conventional movie star. Jane Fonda has always put herself on that other side of the fence, and it's made a lot of men mad.
“She's someone who flaunts the system and gets away with it: rich, glamorous, guru of this, guru of that. She's like the Energizer bunny. She won't go down.”
So Smith spat. Some of those who thought it appropriate recounted stories of soldiers being spat on when they returned from Southeast Asia. Others suggested it was more appropriate to direct the anger toward Robert McNamara, the secretary of defense during the war.
And then there was Sabrina, born long after the war but witness to history.
“I was probably the only 10-year-old in Kansas City … to see Jane Fonda when Mr. Smith spit,” Sabrina wrote.
“I went there because I love the movie ‘Cat Ballou.' She didn't sign my book till after Mr. Smith spit on her.”
To her, “even if Mr. Smith did not agree with Ms. Fonda, it doesn't mean that he can disrespect someone.”
Sabrina asks: How can a country survive with so much hate?
Thursday, April 21, 2005
Nihil curo de ista tua stulta democraticae
<> MOSCOW (Reuters) - Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has put Russia on guard that the United States will not ignore any retreat by Moscow from democratic reforms. During a visit that sent a chill through relations Rice declared that Putin had too much power and she spoke out over the absence of independent television channels. "Rice showed her teeth during talks in Moscow," read a caption in a Russian daily newspaper Thursday, beneath a photograph of a beaming Rice meeting President Vladimir Putin. With plain speaking that left Russia's establishment aghast..."
What if anything would this mean to the Russians? We will not "ignore?" Hey Russia, look out, our intelligence communities are paying attention to you. You better be careful because Rice, one of the seriously most incompetent Soviet scholars in history(she failed to predict to any degree whatsoever the collapse of the Soviet Union when working for Reagan/Bush), is giving you a stern something. And the US has all this power to do what exactly to you?? Maybe we could threaten to not buy their oil? No can't do that, cause then we wouldn't have enough. Shoot. Uuuhhh maybe the US might suggest to the Russians that we would not cooperate with them regarding Iran or China? Well that wouldn't work, since both of the those nations plus India have a vested committed need to handle Iran in their own best interests. Really, there is not one thing the US can do if Russia "retreats" from its so called democratic reforms. So why is Ricesheit making these veiled threats? For us of course, for the Bolton, DeLay news cycle, for the TV audience and the Fox pundits. It is all another scam spin spam, and it is starting to really suck.
What if anything would this mean to the Russians? We will not "ignore?" Hey Russia, look out, our intelligence communities are paying attention to you. You better be careful because Rice, one of the seriously most incompetent Soviet scholars in history(she failed to predict to any degree whatsoever the collapse of the Soviet Union when working for Reagan/Bush), is giving you a stern something. And the US has all this power to do what exactly to you?? Maybe we could threaten to not buy their oil? No can't do that, cause then we wouldn't have enough. Shoot. Uuuhhh maybe the US might suggest to the Russians that we would not cooperate with them regarding Iran or China? Well that wouldn't work, since both of the those nations plus India have a vested committed need to handle Iran in their own best interests. Really, there is not one thing the US can do if Russia "retreats" from its so called democratic reforms. So why is Ricesheit making these veiled threats? For us of course, for the Bolton, DeLay news cycle, for the TV audience and the Fox pundits. It is all another scam spin spam, and it is starting to really suck.
Wednesday, April 20, 2005
whoa, kowabunga dude, surging 0.6%-like overhead
Price of Nearly Everything Rose In March
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Another surge in energy costs helped push up U.S. prices in March, as underlying inflation climbed at the sharpest rate in 2-1/2 years, the Labor Department said on Wednesday.For consumers, gasoline wasn't the only thing that cost them more last month. The government reports its Consumer Price Index surged 0.6% in March, the largest increase in five months. "Excluding energy, household expenses rose quite sharply and the gains were basically across the board. There were the usual suspects. Medical care and education costs are out of control," said economist Joel Naroff, of Naroff Economic Advisors. "I'm saving as fast as I can, but when my-sixteen-year-old hits college, I will probably still go broke. If tuition doesn't kill me, the inability to afford my medicines will."
You always have to like it when they exclude energy in all the formulas. We intentionally exclude the one single factor that accounts for most of the impending disasters on this planet. Energy is the war, the environmental collapse, the battles over extraction versus a healthy future, clean air becoming toxic, clean water becoming hazardous. In every possible way the use of energy resources in the US are the one sole factor that drives all the costs, and yet, we exclude it when accounting for all the variables. The ultimate coverup really, and indeed inexcusable.
Tuesday, April 19, 2005
oluluta chuwita
The National Environmental Policy Act, or "NEPA," requires Federal agencies to make informed decisions to protect our water, air, and the health and quality of life of our communities. On the day that Spokane celebrates Earth Day, Rep. Cathy McMorris will hold the first of 6 formal hearings around the country--part of a plan by Rep. Richard Pombo (R-CA) and other extreme pro-industry members of Congress to gut the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), one of America's bedrock environmental laws. Signed into law by President Nixon 35 years ago, NEPA is considered the Magna Carta of environmental protection - the foundation on which all other environmental laws are built. NEPA directs federal agencies to "prevent or eliminate damage to the environment." Rep. Cathy McMorris (R) has been appointed as the head of the NEPA Taskforce that is organizing these hearings.
Your attendance is urgently needed at this NEPA Taskforce hearing to show Rep. McMorris that her constituents strongly support protecting our environment and oppose efforts to gut our bedrock environmental law. NEPA is a landmark law that puts people before politics; values science over short-term thinking; and respects democracy more than dollar bills. The NEPA Taskforce hearings will focus on how NEPA has "crippled state economies," "impacted jobs" and other "inequities." These hearings, though they are public, are a being designed as a "dog and pony" show to make a case for gutting NEPA. Our participation is critical to make sure this hearing really is a public hearing. Hearing organizers are handpicking the speakers to present a one-sided viewpoint. The public will not have an opportunity to speak at these hearings, but written testimony will be accepted.
Never, never, never let anyone tell you there is a reasonable and conscienable relationship between economies and the environment. This is simply impossible. Economies are human based value constructs created to enable the enfranchised empowered to remove resource wealth from the disenfranchised non-empowered. The haves have found ways to take more from the have nots. No where in the environment is there an economy of scale of any form. Ecosystems, riparian habitats, bio-regions, biomes, all share the basic foundational principles of sustaining life simply for life's sake. And yet here we have politicians demanding that there be a relationship between the two. Jobs are more important that the protection of trees?? How can they say this? There is not way to compare them, unless you place value scales on the integrity of the environment. OOps, don't want to do that because, well, it is too difficult, it is too complex, it is not the same. Oh wait, what was that last one?? aaaaaaaahh you don't remember. bastards all...
Your attendance is urgently needed at this NEPA Taskforce hearing to show Rep. McMorris that her constituents strongly support protecting our environment and oppose efforts to gut our bedrock environmental law. NEPA is a landmark law that puts people before politics; values science over short-term thinking; and respects democracy more than dollar bills. The NEPA Taskforce hearings will focus on how NEPA has "crippled state economies," "impacted jobs" and other "inequities." These hearings, though they are public, are a being designed as a "dog and pony" show to make a case for gutting NEPA. Our participation is critical to make sure this hearing really is a public hearing. Hearing organizers are handpicking the speakers to present a one-sided viewpoint. The public will not have an opportunity to speak at these hearings, but written testimony will be accepted.
Never, never, never let anyone tell you there is a reasonable and conscienable relationship between economies and the environment. This is simply impossible. Economies are human based value constructs created to enable the enfranchised empowered to remove resource wealth from the disenfranchised non-empowered. The haves have found ways to take more from the have nots. No where in the environment is there an economy of scale of any form. Ecosystems, riparian habitats, bio-regions, biomes, all share the basic foundational principles of sustaining life simply for life's sake. And yet here we have politicians demanding that there be a relationship between the two. Jobs are more important that the protection of trees?? How can they say this? There is not way to compare them, unless you place value scales on the integrity of the environment. OOps, don't want to do that because, well, it is too difficult, it is too complex, it is not the same. Oh wait, what was that last one?? aaaaaaaahh you don't remember. bastards all...
Monday, April 18, 2005
ho mitakiye oyasin
The Archbishop of Canterbury's sermon on Sunday reveals insights that may not be what the Pope wanted, and definitely not what the Dominionists in the US had in mind about the future of their destructive greed.
Too often in recent decades, the two big "e" words - ecology and economy - have been used as though they represented opposing concerns. Yes, we should be glad to do more about the environment, if only this didn't interfere with economic development and with the liberty of people and nations to create wealth in whatever ways they can.
Or, we should be glad to address environmental issues if we could be sure that we had first resolved the challenge of economic injustice within and between societies. So from both left and right there has often been a persistent sense that it isn't proper or possible to tackle both together, let alone to give a different sort of priority to ecological matters.
But this separation or opposition has come to look like a massive mistake. It has been said that "the economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment". The earth itself is what ultimately controls economic activity because it is the source of the materials upon which economic activity works.
That is why economy and ecology cannot be separated. Ecological fallout from economic development is in no way an "externality" as the economic jargon has it; it is a positive depletion of real wealth, of human and natural capital. To seek to have economy without ecology is to try to manage an environment with no knowledge or concern about how it works in itself - to try to formulate human laws in abstraction from or ignorance of the laws of nature.
Religious commitment becomes in this context a crucial element in that renewal of our motivation for living realistically in our material setting. The loss of a sustainable environment protected from unlimited exploitation is the loss of a sustainable humanity in every sense - not only the loss of a spiritual depth but ultimately the loss of simple material stability as well. It is up to us as consumers and voters to do better justice to the "house" we have been invited to keep, the world where we are guests.
Sunday, April 17, 2005
Kikta yo' ye.
Conservatives on the State Board of Education have thrown the state back into the emotional debate over evolution as they consider science standards for statewide testing.
I can almost see the test. There are all these questions on the causality of the universe and of the history of the Earth. "The Earth was formed: a) 6000 years ago; b) 60,000 years ago; c) 600,000 years ago; d) 6 million years ago; e) 6 billion years ago?" The only correct response would be A of course, because the other dates are not representative of correlational "theories." Of course a vastly superior way to ask this question would be: "The Earth was formed: a) 6000 years ago; b) 600,000 eons ago; c) Heisenberg's theorum's input data descriptors; d) the unfolding of millions upon millions of aeons; e) 4.3 billion years ago?" Naturally all of these responses are correct, so therefore they must be a substantively better one, one that matches the vast majority of the evidence available-- E.
Now which of these questions do you suppose is most likely to show up on the Kansas statewide achievement testing for science in the public schools??
I can almost see the test. There are all these questions on the causality of the universe and of the history of the Earth. "The Earth was formed: a) 6000 years ago; b) 60,000 years ago; c) 600,000 years ago; d) 6 million years ago; e) 6 billion years ago?" The only correct response would be A of course, because the other dates are not representative of correlational "theories." Of course a vastly superior way to ask this question would be: "The Earth was formed: a) 6000 years ago; b) 600,000 eons ago; c) Heisenberg's theorum's input data descriptors; d) the unfolding of millions upon millions of aeons; e) 4.3 billion years ago?" Naturally all of these responses are correct, so therefore they must be a substantively better one, one that matches the vast majority of the evidence available-- E.
Now which of these questions do you suppose is most likely to show up on the Kansas statewide achievement testing for science in the public schools??
Friday, April 15, 2005
Si hoc signum legere potes
The flier for the Bill Frist endorsed telethon reads: “The filibuster was once abused to protect racial bias, and it is now being used against people of faith.”
Now we have the GOP Raving minions literally selling the idea that maybe their choice of actions are a consumable commodity worthy of the interest of the buying public. Selling fascism is a new twist on an old hegemony. We have marketing strategies designed to cover up the overall intent of the masters of war, to extract any and all remaining pockets of resources and wealth from the population. It is a groupthink that literally holds no life sacred, human or otherwise. They don't even consider the value of their own, otherwise they might ponder a bit longer on the notion that maybe, just maybe, creating a fascist theocracy would eventually be detrimental to their own health and welfare. Afterall these are not the priests, but the burghers, and we all know who was incharge during the Inquisition--hint, it wasn't even the Pope, nor any of the Lords and Kings, but fanatical priests under the direction of Torquemada.
Now we have the GOP Raving minions literally selling the idea that maybe their choice of actions are a consumable commodity worthy of the interest of the buying public. Selling fascism is a new twist on an old hegemony. We have marketing strategies designed to cover up the overall intent of the masters of war, to extract any and all remaining pockets of resources and wealth from the population. It is a groupthink that literally holds no life sacred, human or otherwise. They don't even consider the value of their own, otherwise they might ponder a bit longer on the notion that maybe, just maybe, creating a fascist theocracy would eventually be detrimental to their own health and welfare. Afterall these are not the priests, but the burghers, and we all know who was incharge during the Inquisition--hint, it wasn't even the Pope, nor any of the Lords and Kings, but fanatical priests under the direction of Torquemada.
Thursday, April 14, 2005
Nituktetanhan he?
Now this is the substantive problem described once again in obfuscating ways.
The sales report was worrying because consumer spending accounts for two-thirds of U.S. economic activity and has been the main driver of the rebound from the 2001 recession. The concern is that, pinched by pump prices, people are reining in spending on other things. On top of that, the bulging trade deficit shows that consumers' money is going less to U.S. companies and more to firms overseas. Finally, job growth remains anemic, possibly making shoppers even more reluctant to buy. A slowing economy could mean that today's unusually slack job market and stagnant wages may be the best that can be expected this business cycle. It also could deep-six the booming housing market and further depress stock prices.
These paragraphs followed one that started with the phrase "most economists believe." Think about that for a moment. They don't know, they don't factually present, they don't manifest any greater degree of reliability than belief. An entire system of machinations that do nothing so much more than increase human suffering and all based on faith and a desperate absolute need to increase consumer spending as a means to maintain the system. People spend less and that ruins the economy; this basic principle is so flawed, so vile in its manifestations. If we have a system that is foundationally dependent on convincing the population that it must purchase goods and services it doesn't need at an evergrowing 2% rate just to maintain itself, we have a system deeply detrimental to the health and welfare of the planet. But do they care?? No of course not. As the New Yorker magazine pointed out last week, if you aren't one of the wealthiest people in the world then you just dont understand how good they are for the rest of us. Well a simple reading of basic economic theory renders that argument moot.
The sales report was worrying because consumer spending accounts for two-thirds of U.S. economic activity and has been the main driver of the rebound from the 2001 recession. The concern is that, pinched by pump prices, people are reining in spending on other things. On top of that, the bulging trade deficit shows that consumers' money is going less to U.S. companies and more to firms overseas. Finally, job growth remains anemic, possibly making shoppers even more reluctant to buy. A slowing economy could mean that today's unusually slack job market and stagnant wages may be the best that can be expected this business cycle. It also could deep-six the booming housing market and further depress stock prices.
These paragraphs followed one that started with the phrase "most economists believe." Think about that for a moment. They don't know, they don't factually present, they don't manifest any greater degree of reliability than belief. An entire system of machinations that do nothing so much more than increase human suffering and all based on faith and a desperate absolute need to increase consumer spending as a means to maintain the system. People spend less and that ruins the economy; this basic principle is so flawed, so vile in its manifestations. If we have a system that is foundationally dependent on convincing the population that it must purchase goods and services it doesn't need at an evergrowing 2% rate just to maintain itself, we have a system deeply detrimental to the health and welfare of the planet. But do they care?? No of course not. As the New Yorker magazine pointed out last week, if you aren't one of the wealthiest people in the world then you just dont understand how good they are for the rest of us. Well a simple reading of basic economic theory renders that argument moot.
Wednesday, April 13, 2005
ESEA 2 or no crappy liberty bestowed
No Dentist Left Behind
My dentist is great! He sends me reminders so I don't forget checkups. He uses the latest techniques based on research. He never hurts me, and I've got all my teeth.
>>
When I ran into him the other day, I was eager to see if he'd heard about the new state program. I knew he'd think it was great.
>>
"Did you hear about the new state program to measure effectiveness of dentists with their young patients?" I said.
>>
"No," he said. He didn't seem too thrilled. "How will they do that?"
"It's quite simple," I said.
"They will just count the number of cavities each patient has at age 10, 14, and 18 and average that to determine a dentist's rating.
>>
Dentists will be rated as excellent, good, average, below average, and unsatisfactory. That way parents will know which are the best dentists. The plan will also encourage the less effective dentists to get better," I said. "Poor dentists who don't improve could lose their licenses to practice."
>>
"That's terrible," he said.
>>
"What? That's not a good attitude," I said. "Don't you think we should try to improve children's dental health in this state?"
>>
"Sure I do," he said, "but that's not a fair way to determine who is practicing good dentistry."
>>
"Why not?" I said. "It makes perfect sense to me."
>>
"Well, it's so obvious," he said. "Don't you see that dentists don't all work with the same clientele, and that much depends on things we can't control?
>>
For example, I work in a rural area with a high percentage of patients from deprived homes, while some of my colleagues work in upper middle-class neighborhoods. Many of the parents I work with don't bring their children to see me until there is some kind of problem, and I don't get to do much preventive work. Also many of the parents I serve let their kids eat way too much candy from an early age, unlike more educated parents who understand the relationship between sugar and decay. To top it all off, so many of my clients have well water which is untreated and has no fluoride in it. Do you have any idea how much difference early use of fluoride can make?"
>>
"It sounds like you're making excuses," I said. "I can't believe that you, my dentist, would be so defensive. After all, you do a great job, and you needn't fear a little accountability."
>>
"I am not being defensive!" he said. "My best patients are as good as anyone's, my work is as good as anyone's, but my average cavity count is going to be higher than a lot of other dentists because I chose to work where I am needed most."
>>
"Don't' get touchy," I said.
>>
"Touchy?" he said. His face had turned red, and from the way he was clenching and unclenching his jaws, I was afraid he was going to damage his teeth.
>>
"Try furious! In a system like this, I will end up being rated average, below average, or worse. The few educated patients I have who see these ratings may believe this so-called rating is an actual measure of my ability and proficiency as a dentist. They may leave me, and I'll be left with only the most needy patients. And my cavity average score will get even worse. On top of that, how will I attract good dental hygienists and other excellent dentists to my practice if it is labeled below average?"
>>
"I think you are overreacting," I said. "'Complaining, excuse-making and stonewalling won't improve dental health'...I am quoting from a leading member of the DOC," I noted.
>>
"What's the DOC?" he asked.
>>
"It's the Dental Oversight Committee," I said, "a group made up of mostly lay persons to make sure dentistry in this state gets improved."
>>
"Spare me," he said, "I can't believe this. Reasonable people won't buy it," he said hopefully.
>>
The program sounded reasonable to me, so I asked, "How else would you measure good dentistry?"
>>
"Come watch me work," he said. "Observe my processes." "That's too complicated, expensive and time- consuming," I said.
"Cavities are the bottom line, and you can't argue with the bottom line. It's an absolute measure."
>>
"That's what I'm afraid my parents and prospective patients will think. This can't be happening," he said despairingly.
>>
"Now, now," I said, "don't despair. The state will help you some."
"How?" he asked.
>>
"If you receive a poor rating, they'll send a dentist who is rated excellent to help straighten you out," I said brightly.
>>
"You mean," he said, "they'll send a dentist with a wealthy clientele to show me how to work on severe juvenile dental problems with which I have probably had much more experience? BIG HELP!"
>>
"There you go again," I said. "You aren't acting professionally at all."
>>
"You don't get it," he said. "Doing this would be like grading schools and teachers on an average score made on a test of children's progress with no regard to influences outside the school, the home, the community served and stuff like that. Why would they do something so unfair to dentists? No one would ever think of doing that to schools."
>>
I just shook my head sadly, but he had brightened. "I'm going to write my representatives and senators," he said. "I'll use the school analogy. Surely they will see the point."
>>
He walked off with that look of hope mixed with fear and suppressed anger that I, a teacher, see in the mirror so often lately.
>>
If you don't understand why educators resent the recent federal NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND ACT, this may help. If you do understand, you'll enjoy this analogy, which was forwarded by John S. Taylor, Superintendent of Schools for the Lancaster County, PA, School District. Be a friend to a teacher and pass this on.
>
My dentist is great! He sends me reminders so I don't forget checkups. He uses the latest techniques based on research. He never hurts me, and I've got all my teeth.
>>
When I ran into him the other day, I was eager to see if he'd heard about the new state program. I knew he'd think it was great.
>>
"Did you hear about the new state program to measure effectiveness of dentists with their young patients?" I said.
>>
"No," he said. He didn't seem too thrilled. "How will they do that?"
"It's quite simple," I said.
"They will just count the number of cavities each patient has at age 10, 14, and 18 and average that to determine a dentist's rating.
>>
Dentists will be rated as excellent, good, average, below average, and unsatisfactory. That way parents will know which are the best dentists. The plan will also encourage the less effective dentists to get better," I said. "Poor dentists who don't improve could lose their licenses to practice."
>>
"That's terrible," he said.
>>
"What? That's not a good attitude," I said. "Don't you think we should try to improve children's dental health in this state?"
>>
"Sure I do," he said, "but that's not a fair way to determine who is practicing good dentistry."
>>
"Why not?" I said. "It makes perfect sense to me."
>>
"Well, it's so obvious," he said. "Don't you see that dentists don't all work with the same clientele, and that much depends on things we can't control?
>>
For example, I work in a rural area with a high percentage of patients from deprived homes, while some of my colleagues work in upper middle-class neighborhoods. Many of the parents I work with don't bring their children to see me until there is some kind of problem, and I don't get to do much preventive work. Also many of the parents I serve let their kids eat way too much candy from an early age, unlike more educated parents who understand the relationship between sugar and decay. To top it all off, so many of my clients have well water which is untreated and has no fluoride in it. Do you have any idea how much difference early use of fluoride can make?"
>>
"It sounds like you're making excuses," I said. "I can't believe that you, my dentist, would be so defensive. After all, you do a great job, and you needn't fear a little accountability."
>>
"I am not being defensive!" he said. "My best patients are as good as anyone's, my work is as good as anyone's, but my average cavity count is going to be higher than a lot of other dentists because I chose to work where I am needed most."
>>
"Don't' get touchy," I said.
>>
"Touchy?" he said. His face had turned red, and from the way he was clenching and unclenching his jaws, I was afraid he was going to damage his teeth.
>>
"Try furious! In a system like this, I will end up being rated average, below average, or worse. The few educated patients I have who see these ratings may believe this so-called rating is an actual measure of my ability and proficiency as a dentist. They may leave me, and I'll be left with only the most needy patients. And my cavity average score will get even worse. On top of that, how will I attract good dental hygienists and other excellent dentists to my practice if it is labeled below average?"
>>
"I think you are overreacting," I said. "'Complaining, excuse-making and stonewalling won't improve dental health'...I am quoting from a leading member of the DOC," I noted.
>>
"What's the DOC?" he asked.
>>
"It's the Dental Oversight Committee," I said, "a group made up of mostly lay persons to make sure dentistry in this state gets improved."
>>
"Spare me," he said, "I can't believe this. Reasonable people won't buy it," he said hopefully.
>>
The program sounded reasonable to me, so I asked, "How else would you measure good dentistry?"
>>
"Come watch me work," he said. "Observe my processes." "That's too complicated, expensive and time- consuming," I said.
"Cavities are the bottom line, and you can't argue with the bottom line. It's an absolute measure."
>>
"That's what I'm afraid my parents and prospective patients will think. This can't be happening," he said despairingly.
>>
"Now, now," I said, "don't despair. The state will help you some."
"How?" he asked.
>>
"If you receive a poor rating, they'll send a dentist who is rated excellent to help straighten you out," I said brightly.
>>
"You mean," he said, "they'll send a dentist with a wealthy clientele to show me how to work on severe juvenile dental problems with which I have probably had much more experience? BIG HELP!"
>>
"There you go again," I said. "You aren't acting professionally at all."
>>
"You don't get it," he said. "Doing this would be like grading schools and teachers on an average score made on a test of children's progress with no regard to influences outside the school, the home, the community served and stuff like that. Why would they do something so unfair to dentists? No one would ever think of doing that to schools."
>>
I just shook my head sadly, but he had brightened. "I'm going to write my representatives and senators," he said. "I'll use the school analogy. Surely they will see the point."
>>
He walked off with that look of hope mixed with fear and suppressed anger that I, a teacher, see in the mirror so often lately.
>>
If you don't understand why educators resent the recent federal NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND ACT, this may help. If you do understand, you'll enjoy this analogy, which was forwarded by John S. Taylor, Superintendent of Schools for the Lancaster County, PA, School District. Be a friend to a teacher and pass this on.
>
Tuesday, April 12, 2005
Raptus regaliter
Rumsfeld warns against cronyism
US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld warned Iraq's new leaders against political purges and cronyism that could create "lack of confidence or corruption in government".
This has to be one of the single most egregious examples of just how evil this administration can be, yet seen during this war. A man who is every bit the role model for cronyism, for horrendous corruption within the military/industrial complex, for failure of generating any respect among his own subordinates--telling Iraq to do as i say, not as i do????? While his own friends are undergoing intense scrutiny for their regular purges of political foes, indeed calling for violence against a judiciary that although they helped create does not serve their own personal interests. Promotions abound for those that are friends, no matter the previous convictions and extreme lapses of ethical judgement. Wives and daughters run campaigns and receive massive cash infusions from PAC's and Halliburton and friends. Trips are paid for by lobbyists who prove their worth when bills are passed that represent their personal views. And Rummy suggests that Iraq shouldn't act like that??? Why?? Doesn't it work??
US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld warned Iraq's new leaders against political purges and cronyism that could create "lack of confidence or corruption in government".
This has to be one of the single most egregious examples of just how evil this administration can be, yet seen during this war. A man who is every bit the role model for cronyism, for horrendous corruption within the military/industrial complex, for failure of generating any respect among his own subordinates--telling Iraq to do as i say, not as i do????? While his own friends are undergoing intense scrutiny for their regular purges of political foes, indeed calling for violence against a judiciary that although they helped create does not serve their own personal interests. Promotions abound for those that are friends, no matter the previous convictions and extreme lapses of ethical judgement. Wives and daughters run campaigns and receive massive cash infusions from PAC's and Halliburton and friends. Trips are paid for by lobbyists who prove their worth when bills are passed that represent their personal views. And Rummy suggests that Iraq shouldn't act like that??? Why?? Doesn't it work??
Saturday, April 09, 2005
Le Christeyi tokeske eyapi he?
"This is not a Democrat- Republican issue; it is a liberal-conservative issue," Rick Scarborough, a former Congressman, a Baptist minister, and chair of the Judeo-Christian Council for Constitutional Restoration, sponsor of the gathering, said in an interview. "It's about a temporal versus eternal value system. We are not going away." While conservatives have long accused liberal judges of making, rather than interpreting, laws, Massachusetts' adoption of gay marriage last year and Schiavo's death last week have magnified their fury. Whereas before they complained about "judicial arrogance," speakers this week accused courts of "gang violence" and waging "unholy war" -- and drew applause when they called for the removal of judges who believe that interpretations of the US Constitution should change with the times. Representative Lamar Smith, Republican of Texas and a member of the House Judiciary Committee, called the situation "a crisis."
It is imperative that we visualize, we construct, we manifest a picture of this nation if these people were to have their way. We need to get this vision out into the general media, the MSM, so that the citizens of this nation have an accurate way to measure just what these people want to do with the US. Picture a country controlled by extreme fascist evangelical christians. Who would be left alive. Death squads for jesus would roam the streets killing any and all persons who do not fit the prototypical evangelical fundamentalist impassioned zealot. These people are already turning on their own conservative brethren, what would keep them from cannibalizing it all. Waging holy wars to end all wars against the barbarians and heathens across the planet. There is no logic in their mindset that would stop them from using nuclear weapons against all of the islamic and non-christian nations. They would be forced to destroy Israel, as part of their destined faith. They would be forced to take on China as a means to create a christian planet. But they would start here.
First they would fill the prisons with all of those that exhibit non-CCRR behaviors and tendencies. This would be determined first by profiling based on generalized stereotyping. Long haired males, short haired females, fashion conscious men, tomboy looking women, people seen smoking something other than US commercially made tobacco products, people not contributing tithes as ordered by government, anyone charged with any small petty crimes that victimized the CCRR people---all of these would be locked away, until the prisons were overflowing. Then they would start the killing. Claiming pestilence and disease as the hands of the judgemental apocalyptic lords they would fumigate the vermin, literally toxifying the prisons with pesticides and herbicides. Then they will turn that effort on the hungry mouths of the children of non-CCRR families and others. Without proper baptisms there will be no food deliveries. Simple effective strategy to enforce a future generation to adhere. Whenever protests and riots spark, full scale invasions will be launched, again through the wisdom of revelations, slaughtering and destroying the non-believers.
I wish this were fantasy, it were science fiction, it were something from long ago. But it is not. These people, with money and authority and military means, are serious about taking control of this country and destroying it to save it. Believe me when i tell you, we cannot continue to laugh at them. They are not just a simple joke of lunacy, they are a craven hideous evil that must be destroyed before they destroy this Earth.
It is imperative that we visualize, we construct, we manifest a picture of this nation if these people were to have their way. We need to get this vision out into the general media, the MSM, so that the citizens of this nation have an accurate way to measure just what these people want to do with the US. Picture a country controlled by extreme fascist evangelical christians. Who would be left alive. Death squads for jesus would roam the streets killing any and all persons who do not fit the prototypical evangelical fundamentalist impassioned zealot. These people are already turning on their own conservative brethren, what would keep them from cannibalizing it all. Waging holy wars to end all wars against the barbarians and heathens across the planet. There is no logic in their mindset that would stop them from using nuclear weapons against all of the islamic and non-christian nations. They would be forced to destroy Israel, as part of their destined faith. They would be forced to take on China as a means to create a christian planet. But they would start here.
First they would fill the prisons with all of those that exhibit non-CCRR behaviors and tendencies. This would be determined first by profiling based on generalized stereotyping. Long haired males, short haired females, fashion conscious men, tomboy looking women, people seen smoking something other than US commercially made tobacco products, people not contributing tithes as ordered by government, anyone charged with any small petty crimes that victimized the CCRR people---all of these would be locked away, until the prisons were overflowing. Then they would start the killing. Claiming pestilence and disease as the hands of the judgemental apocalyptic lords they would fumigate the vermin, literally toxifying the prisons with pesticides and herbicides. Then they will turn that effort on the hungry mouths of the children of non-CCRR families and others. Without proper baptisms there will be no food deliveries. Simple effective strategy to enforce a future generation to adhere. Whenever protests and riots spark, full scale invasions will be launched, again through the wisdom of revelations, slaughtering and destroying the non-believers.
I wish this were fantasy, it were science fiction, it were something from long ago. But it is not. These people, with money and authority and military means, are serious about taking control of this country and destroying it to save it. Believe me when i tell you, we cannot continue to laugh at them. They are not just a simple joke of lunacy, they are a craven hideous evil that must be destroyed before they destroy this Earth.
Thursday, April 07, 2005
Nikhuja he?
From Worldwatch Institute today, this summary of problems that a new pope needs to address. I wonder why we continue to not ask our own national and regional leadership about their handling of these matters. Is it possible that we are so unwilling to change our own way of life, that we hope that faith based solutions will become manifest across the planet, helping those that suffer immeasureably by our actions, to overcome their suffering, just so we don't have to suffer? Yes it is..
- We live in an era of mass extinction—the first in 65 million years, and the first ever caused by human activities. This is essentially the unraveling, in just a few decades, of billions of years of a creative, evolutionary process that made life as we know it possible.
- We are changing the planet’s climate and raising the level of the seven seas; unchecked, this will eventually eliminate whole low-lying island nations and permanently flood coastal ones, change patterns of rainfall and drought, further reduce some species populations and spread disease.
- We are apathetic in the face of mass poverty. Billions of people lack clean water and sanitation, for example, and one in eight are chronically hungry, despite ongoing food surpluses. This in a world of unprecedented wealth: the United Nations reported in 1998 that three individual persons—persons!—held as much wealth as the combined GDP of the world’s 48 poorest countries. Meanwhile, a generation of middle-age children in wealthy countries is on the cusp of the greatest transfer of wealth in history, as they inherit trillions of dollars from their parents. What is their responsibility in a world of mass deprivation?
- We increasingly seek salvation through consumption. Citizens of wealthy countries appear to have insatiable appetites: new houses in the United States are 38 percent larger than in 1975, the United States now has more cars than drivers, and two-thirds of American adults are overweight or obese. Our search for meaning seems increasingly to take place at the mall.
Wednesday, April 06, 2005
stats and evaluations
So, a small percentage change in the population is seen as a movement towards rejection of the CCRR fascism. I don't think this will matter one tiny bit when the sheit hits the proverbial fan. The fascism will always win out leading to the final battles for control of the basic and essential resources. We have more and more chances to fall into a state of chaos and destructiveness whilst the have nots begin to die from increasing diseases, famines, lack of sufficient shelter, etc. Too tired, sick, and famished to fight over resources the plan of the CCRR's is to swamp the nation with military experienced private security apparatchiks who will easily take control of transportation routes and resource streams. The public be damned...
Monday, April 04, 2005
Tanyan yaun he?
No not really! I was just thinking about five to ten years down the road when the following policies have had their full effect and the nature of the disparity of haves and have nots in this country is at its greatest.
But even so, today's story highlights the wild-eyed ferocity with which he has persecuted the labor movement. For instance, right-wing appointees to the National Labor Relations Board announced that they're taking aim at card-check recognition: the fairest and fastest process for workers to demonstrate they want a union. He dissolved the labor-management partnership councils – a key measure to give workers more input in federal contracting. He repealed workplace ergonomic standards that were designed to prevent worker on-the-job injuries. And the administration actually intervened to block a California law that said employers couldn't use taxpayer money to run anti-union campaigns in the workplace.
This, of course, says nothing about Bush's refusal to support a serious increase in the minimum wage, his unending support for corporate-written free trade deals that sell out American jobs, his hearty endorsement of outsourcing, and his desire to allow companies to unilaterally change their pension system to screw workers. Nor does it say anything about how his administration has given secret sweetheart deals to Wal-Mart, essentially giving the most anti-union company on the globe a free hand to continue its abusive union busting practices.
labor in no longer organized in any way with the exception of the various slaveries imposed by depression, economic bankruptcies, few jobs at next to nothing pay, millions upon millions homeless and with out food willing to work just to eat on environmental clean up farms and hazardous wastes sites and such. WalMarts will only be selling to the upper classes who still can afford the cheap shit from China. There will be few if any manufacturing jobs and the service sectors will be composed of what was formerly public governmental functions now taken over by private groups who support the infrastructure of the haves. Whole regions will become have not zones, fenced with electric barbed razor wires to keep them in where they literally and figuratively cannibalize one another. yeah we really need to get rid of labor unions alright.
But even so, today's story highlights the wild-eyed ferocity with which he has persecuted the labor movement. For instance, right-wing appointees to the National Labor Relations Board announced that they're taking aim at card-check recognition: the fairest and fastest process for workers to demonstrate they want a union. He dissolved the labor-management partnership councils – a key measure to give workers more input in federal contracting. He repealed workplace ergonomic standards that were designed to prevent worker on-the-job injuries. And the administration actually intervened to block a California law that said employers couldn't use taxpayer money to run anti-union campaigns in the workplace.
This, of course, says nothing about Bush's refusal to support a serious increase in the minimum wage, his unending support for corporate-written free trade deals that sell out American jobs, his hearty endorsement of outsourcing, and his desire to allow companies to unilaterally change their pension system to screw workers. Nor does it say anything about how his administration has given secret sweetheart deals to Wal-Mart, essentially giving the most anti-union company on the globe a free hand to continue its abusive union busting practices.
labor in no longer organized in any way with the exception of the various slaveries imposed by depression, economic bankruptcies, few jobs at next to nothing pay, millions upon millions homeless and with out food willing to work just to eat on environmental clean up farms and hazardous wastes sites and such. WalMarts will only be selling to the upper classes who still can afford the cheap shit from China. There will be few if any manufacturing jobs and the service sectors will be composed of what was formerly public governmental functions now taken over by private groups who support the infrastructure of the haves. Whole regions will become have not zones, fenced with electric barbed razor wires to keep them in where they literally and figuratively cannibalize one another. yeah we really need to get rid of labor unions alright.
Sunday, April 03, 2005
Dulce bellum inexpertis.
The metaphoric representation of politics as a scaled pendulum swinging freely between this or that position, may be valid, only so long as the pendulum swings. When it stops, there would be the supposition of balance and the presentation of equilibrium, that, by virtue of all known human relations, would not be possible. The swing can be rhythmic and non-precessive, as well as delicately focussed between two clearly opposed views and so forth. This would happen when the mass of societies are understanding of the implications of holding those views and the presentation of authorities in voicing them in non-threatening manners. None of this applies to now.
We live in a time, that if the metaphor holds, the pendulum is swinging highly erratically, highly chaotically. Forces of great complexity are expressing enormous energies along vectors that are neither aligned, nor harmonious to well being and balance. I think all of this stems from one common causality. There are no leadership type entities who have a clue on what is going on. NONE, zippo, nada. They would like others to think they know, or even would like the comfort of thinking that they know, but none do. Noone knows when the next act of freaking earth inspired terror will come. None know when the delicate propping up of currencies and energy based economies will come to a screetching halt. Not a soul understands the totality of implications of policies mandated. So we get thousands upon thousands of short term actions, all eliciting energies that are counter to anything that can be remotely considered good. If we take any single one of these policy threads we discover that very quickly the manifestations of these all lead to a destructive affect. In toto, the one single point at which the pendulum of political ideas will achieve stasis is when it is all destroyed. Unfortunately, none of those believers will attain rapture, none of the victims will be acknowledged for suffering in vain, none of those responsible will be held accountable. It is simply all becoming dead.
We live in a time, that if the metaphor holds, the pendulum is swinging highly erratically, highly chaotically. Forces of great complexity are expressing enormous energies along vectors that are neither aligned, nor harmonious to well being and balance. I think all of this stems from one common causality. There are no leadership type entities who have a clue on what is going on. NONE, zippo, nada. They would like others to think they know, or even would like the comfort of thinking that they know, but none do. Noone knows when the next act of freaking earth inspired terror will come. None know when the delicate propping up of currencies and energy based economies will come to a screetching halt. Not a soul understands the totality of implications of policies mandated. So we get thousands upon thousands of short term actions, all eliciting energies that are counter to anything that can be remotely considered good. If we take any single one of these policy threads we discover that very quickly the manifestations of these all lead to a destructive affect. In toto, the one single point at which the pendulum of political ideas will achieve stasis is when it is all destroyed. Unfortunately, none of those believers will attain rapture, none of the victims will be acknowledged for suffering in vain, none of those responsible will be held accountable. It is simply all becoming dead.
Saturday, April 02, 2005
isn't fascism lovely...
Are Milton Mayer's conversations with Germany's 'ordinary' Nazis, Frank Zappa's warning of a theocratic America, and the Christian right's 'Christian Nation' mantra signs of a nation drifting towards theocracy?
By Bill Berkowitz, Dissident Voice
On November 7, 1938, Herschel Grynszpan, a 17-year-old Polish Jew, assassinated Ernst von Rath, a low-ranking German official, at his embassy in Paris. Two days later, Kristallnacht ("Night of Crystal"), a pogrom that destroyed synagogues, Jewish-owned homes, stores and community centers, commenced.
Kristalnacht was incited by a well-organized "intense campaign against Jews [which] began on German National Radio," Milton Mayer wrote in his 1955 book They Thought They Were Free. Dr. Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi regime's Propaganda Minister, directed the campaign that appeared to move ordinary Germans to action against Jews: Are the German people going to be "sitting ducks all over the world for Jew murderers?" the radio voice challenged. "Are the German people to stand helpless while the Fuhrer's representatives are shot down by the Jew swine? Are the Schweinehunde to get off scott free? Is the wrath of the German People against the Israelite scum to be restrained any longer?"
Ten years after World War II, Milton Mayer went to Germany, where he spent a year searching to find out how ordinary Germans -- not Nazi Party leaders -- seamlessly and somewhat comfortably accepted and embraced fascism.
In a television interview in 1986 -- nearly fifty years after Kristalnacht -- Frank Zappa, a rock musician and free speech advocate, warned that America itself was headed "toward a fascist theocracy."
Only a few months ago, right wing Christian fundamentalists were claiming that Christmas -- and therefore Christians -- was under attack. They vowed that they were not going to take it any more.
Milton Mayer's year-long pilgrimage to Germany and his conversation with "ordinary Germans, Frank Zappa's warning on CNN's Crossfire and the Christian right's campaign against church/state separationists makes for an unusual trifecta. Yet these disparate threads of the past and present represent clear trends in America's political landscape as George W. Bush settles in to his second term.
Frank Zappa's Warning
The late Frank Zappa, best known for fronting The Mothers of Invention -- a difficult-to-categorize late sixties/early seventies group of disparate musicians -- was a dynamic figure; a composer, singer-guitarist, bandleader, graphic artist, filmmaker, satirist, political commentator and author of The REAL Frank Zappa Book.
He was also a passionate defender of the First Amendment and testified before Congress on censorship-related issues. His most publicized appearance was on September 19, 1985, before the US Senate Commerce, Technology, and Transportation committee, where he spoke out against the Parents Music Resource Center or PMRC, a music censorship organization founded by then-Senator Al Gore's wife Tipper Gore, and several other political wives, including those of five members of the committee.
During his 1986 appearance on CNN's Crossfire, Zappa made it clear that the hullabaloo surrounding the censorship of rock lyrics was an attempt to suppress free speech. In the tradition of the late Lenny Bruce and George Carlin, Zappa said that he didn't "believe there are any words that need to be suppressed."
After getting steadily bashed by his counterpart, the conservative Washington Times columnist John Lofton, he turned toward him and told him to "kiss my ass." The program, which hadn't started out with any references to smooching, devolved to that point after an exasperated and infuriated Lofton kept accusing Zappa of refusing to condemn rock lyrics that encouraged incest.
During those early days of "Crossfire" -- and some might argue it has remained that way until only the past few years -- the left was barely distinguishable from the right. "From the left" was Tom Braden, who ran the C.I.A.'s covert cultural division in the early 1950's and 30 years later could barely muster up a coherent progressive thought, and "from the right" was a younger and surprisingly less irascible Robert Novak. (To view the entire interview, see ifilm.com.)
Later, when Lofton claimed that America's families were under attack and threatened by out-of-control musicians, Zappa stated clearly that the "the biggest threat to America is not communism, it's moving America toward a fascist theocracy, and everything that's happened during the Reagan Administration is steering us right down that path." (For more on Zappa's life see Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.)
By Bill Berkowitz, Dissident Voice
"No people ever recognize their dictator in advance. He never stands for election on the platform of dictatorship. He always represents himself as the instrument [of] the Incorporated National Will. ... When our dictator turns up you can depend on it that he will be one of the boys, and he will stand for everything traditionally American. And nobody will ever say 'Heil' to him, nor will they call him 'Fuhrer' or 'Duce.' But they will greet him with one great big, universal, democratic, sheeplike bleat of 'O.K., Chief! Fix it like you wanna, Chief! Oh Kaaaay!'"
-- Dorothy Thompson, 1935
"What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security...".
-- They Thought They Were Free, Milton Mayer, 1955
"Whoooo could imagine, that they would freak out, in Kansas, Kansas, badoobie-doobie-do, Kansas, Kansas...""... STOP groups like the ACLU from removing all mentions of Christmas from the public square!" -- Christian Response e-Alert, December 2004
-- Help I'm A Rock, The Mothers of Invention, 1966
On November 7, 1938, Herschel Grynszpan, a 17-year-old Polish Jew, assassinated Ernst von Rath, a low-ranking German official, at his embassy in Paris. Two days later, Kristallnacht ("Night of Crystal"), a pogrom that destroyed synagogues, Jewish-owned homes, stores and community centers, commenced.
Kristalnacht was incited by a well-organized "intense campaign against Jews [which] began on German National Radio," Milton Mayer wrote in his 1955 book They Thought They Were Free. Dr. Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi regime's Propaganda Minister, directed the campaign that appeared to move ordinary Germans to action against Jews: Are the German people going to be "sitting ducks all over the world for Jew murderers?" the radio voice challenged. "Are the German people to stand helpless while the Fuhrer's representatives are shot down by the Jew swine? Are the Schweinehunde to get off scott free? Is the wrath of the German People against the Israelite scum to be restrained any longer?"
Ten years after World War II, Milton Mayer went to Germany, where he spent a year searching to find out how ordinary Germans -- not Nazi Party leaders -- seamlessly and somewhat comfortably accepted and embraced fascism.
In a television interview in 1986 -- nearly fifty years after Kristalnacht -- Frank Zappa, a rock musician and free speech advocate, warned that America itself was headed "toward a fascist theocracy."
Only a few months ago, right wing Christian fundamentalists were claiming that Christmas -- and therefore Christians -- was under attack. They vowed that they were not going to take it any more.
Milton Mayer's year-long pilgrimage to Germany and his conversation with "ordinary Germans, Frank Zappa's warning on CNN's Crossfire and the Christian right's campaign against church/state separationists makes for an unusual trifecta. Yet these disparate threads of the past and present represent clear trends in America's political landscape as George W. Bush settles in to his second term.
Frank Zappa's Warning
The late Frank Zappa, best known for fronting The Mothers of Invention -- a difficult-to-categorize late sixties/early seventies group of disparate musicians -- was a dynamic figure; a composer, singer-guitarist, bandleader, graphic artist, filmmaker, satirist, political commentator and author of The REAL Frank Zappa Book.
He was also a passionate defender of the First Amendment and testified before Congress on censorship-related issues. His most publicized appearance was on September 19, 1985, before the US Senate Commerce, Technology, and Transportation committee, where he spoke out against the Parents Music Resource Center or PMRC, a music censorship organization founded by then-Senator Al Gore's wife Tipper Gore, and several other political wives, including those of five members of the committee.
During his 1986 appearance on CNN's Crossfire, Zappa made it clear that the hullabaloo surrounding the censorship of rock lyrics was an attempt to suppress free speech. In the tradition of the late Lenny Bruce and George Carlin, Zappa said that he didn't "believe there are any words that need to be suppressed."
After getting steadily bashed by his counterpart, the conservative Washington Times columnist John Lofton, he turned toward him and told him to "kiss my ass." The program, which hadn't started out with any references to smooching, devolved to that point after an exasperated and infuriated Lofton kept accusing Zappa of refusing to condemn rock lyrics that encouraged incest.
During those early days of "Crossfire" -- and some might argue it has remained that way until only the past few years -- the left was barely distinguishable from the right. "From the left" was Tom Braden, who ran the C.I.A.'s covert cultural division in the early 1950's and 30 years later could barely muster up a coherent progressive thought, and "from the right" was a younger and surprisingly less irascible Robert Novak. (To view the entire interview, see ifilm.com.)
Later, when Lofton claimed that America's families were under attack and threatened by out-of-control musicians, Zappa stated clearly that the "the biggest threat to America is not communism, it's moving America toward a fascist theocracy, and everything that's happened during the Reagan Administration is steering us right down that path." (For more on Zappa's life see Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.)
ladies and gentleman, here's fascism!
"No people ever recognize their dictator in advance. He never stands for election on the platform of dictatorship. He always represents himself as the instrument [of] the Incorporated National Will. ... When our dictator turns up you can depend on it that he will be one of the boys, and he will stand for everything traditionally American. And nobody will ever say 'Heil' to him, nor will they call him 'Fuhrer' or 'Duce.' But they will greet him with one great big, universal, democratic, sheeplike bleat of 'O.K., Chief! Fix it like you wanna, Chief! Oh Kaaaay!'"
-- Dorothy Thompson, 1935
"What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security...".
-- They Thought They Were Free, Milton Mayer, 1955
"Whoooo could imagine, that they would freak out, in Kansas, Kansas, badoobie-doobie-do, Kansas, Kansas...""... STOP groups like the ACLU from removing all mentions of Christmas from the public square!" -- Christian Response e-Alert, December 2004
-- Help I'm A Rock, The Mothers of Invention, 1966
On November 7, 1938, Herschel Grynszpan, a 17-year-old Polish Jew, assassinated Ernst von Rath, a low-ranking German official, at his embassy in Paris. Two days later, Kristallnacht ("Night of Crystal"), a pogrom that destroyed synagogues, Jewish-owned homes, stores and community centers, commenced.
Kristalnacht was incited by a well-organized "intense campaign against Jews [which] began on German National Radio," Milton Mayer wrote in his 1955 book They Thought They Were Free. Dr. Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi regime's Propaganda Minister, directed the campaign that appeared to move ordinary Germans to action against Jews: Are the German people going to be "sitting ducks all over the world for Jew murderers?" the radio voice challenged. "Are the German people to stand helpless while the Fuhrer's representatives are shot down by the Jew swine? Are the Schweinehunde to get off scott free? Is the wrath of the German People against the Israelite scum to be restrained any longer?"
Ten years after World War II, Milton Mayer went to Germany, where he spent a year searching to find out how ordinary Germans -- not Nazi Party leaders -- seamlessly and somewhat comfortably accepted and embraced fascism.
In a television interview in 1986 -- nearly fifty years after Kristalnacht -- Frank Zappa, a rock musician and free speech advocate, warned that America itself was headed "toward a fascist theocracy."
Only a few months ago, right wing Christian fundamentalists were claiming that Christmas -- and therefore Christians -- was under attack. They vowed that they were not going to take it any more.
Milton Mayer's year-long pilgrimage to Germany and his conversation with "ordinary Germans, Frank Zappa's warning on CNN's Crossfire and the Christian right's campaign against church/state separationists makes for an unusual trifecta. Yet these disparate threads of the past and present represent clear trends in America's political landscape as George W. Bush settles in to his second term.
Frank Zappa's Warning
The late Frank Zappa, best known for fronting The Mothers of Invention -- a difficult-to-categorize late sixties/early seventies group of disparate musicians -- was a dynamic figure; a composer, singer-guitarist, bandleader, graphic artist, filmmaker, satirist, political commentator and author of The REAL Frank Zappa Book.
He was also a passionate defender of the First Amendment and testified before Congress on censorship-related issues. His most publicized appearance was on September 19, 1985, before the US Senate Commerce, Technology, and Transportation committee, where he spoke out against the Parents Music Resource Center or PMRC, a music censorship organization founded by then-Senator Al Gore's wife Tipper Gore, and several other political wives, including those of five members of the committee.
During his 1986 appearance on CNN's Crossfire, Zappa made it clear that the hullabaloo surrounding the censorship of rock lyrics was an attempt to suppress free speech. In the tradition of the late Lenny Bruce and George Carlin, Zappa said that he didn't "believe there are any words that need to be suppressed."
After getting steadily bashed by his counterpart, the conservative Washington Times columnist John Lofton, he turned toward him and told him to "kiss my ass." The program, which hadn't started out with any references to smooching, devolved to that point after an exasperated and infuriated Lofton kept accusing Zappa of refusing to condemn rock lyrics that encouraged incest.
During those early days of "Crossfire" -- and some might argue it has remained that way until only the past few years -- the left was barely distinguishable from the right. "From the left" was Tom Braden, who ran the C.I.A.'s covert cultural division in the early 1950's and 30 years later could barely muster up a coherent progressive thought, and "from the right" was a younger and surprisingly less irascible Robert Novak. (To view the entire interview, see ifilm.com.)
Later, when Lofton claimed that America's families were under attack and threatened by out-of-control musicians, Zappa stated clearly that the "the biggest threat to America is not communism, it's moving America toward a fascist theocracy, and everything that's happened during the Reagan Administration is steering us right down that path." (For more on Zappa's life see Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.)
Bill Berkowitz is a longtime observer of the conservative movement. His WorkingForChange column Conservative Watch documents the strategies, players, institutions, victories and defeats of the American Right.
Reprinted from Dissident Voice:
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Apr05/Berkowitz0401.htm
Friday, April 01, 2005
Tókheshkhe óchiciya owakihi he?
"I urge all those who honour Terri Schiavo to continue to work to build a culture of life where all Americans are welcomed and valued and protected, especially those who live at the mercy of others," Bush said. "The essence of civilization is that the strong have a duty to protect the weak. In cases where there are serious doubts and questions, the presumption should be in the favour of life."
Yet another documentable blatant lie. This one is so insidiously easy to discredit that it is a wonder that that bimbo now speaking for him in Texas can even keep a straight face when responding to questions. Those who live at the mercy of others must include: iraqis, afghanis, immigrants in the US, people on social security and other welfare supports, et al. Hell people who live on the mercy of others include US military personnel and all of those sitting in US Veteran's hospitals who are about to be put out on the streets with, you got it, no support, no protection, no value. But why would BushCo every stop lying to us. It will never be in his best interest to have to ever tell the truth about anything he thinks or does. Why? Because he doesn't know..
Yet another documentable blatant lie. This one is so insidiously easy to discredit that it is a wonder that that bimbo now speaking for him in Texas can even keep a straight face when responding to questions. Those who live at the mercy of others must include: iraqis, afghanis, immigrants in the US, people on social security and other welfare supports, et al. Hell people who live on the mercy of others include US military personnel and all of those sitting in US Veteran's hospitals who are about to be put out on the streets with, you got it, no support, no protection, no value. But why would BushCo every stop lying to us. It will never be in his best interest to have to ever tell the truth about anything he thinks or does. Why? Because he doesn't know..
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