Remember the jokes-on-them cautionary tale about admen trying to sell the Chevy NOVA in Latin America, oblivious that “no va” means “doesn’t go?” in Spanish. You’d think Capitalism’s missionaries would know their “freedom” brand has already been unmasked. Translated it means “World Bank Compliant Fascist State” whose media is embed only. How ironic that capitalism in democracy’s clothing is heralding World Press Freedom Day. I suppose Russia and Iran are held as examples where the press isn’t free, although RT and PRESSTV are by far more reliable sources of news than anything in the “free” world. I most appreciated WPFD for the light it brought on its international supporters, bloggers who I might not have immediately known were sock puppets for western tentacles. Here’s someone in Colombia who depends “in great part on international co-operation” to fund her work.

Must we say please? “OBAMA, PENDEJO, POR FAVOR CLOSE GITMO!” When the chants on your march are multilingual, even in Colorado some people need the Spanish translated for them. Do you know what “Obama, Escucha, Estamos en la lucha” means? Is it true, we’re prepared to fight? This is irrelevant bluster from the mouths of SEIU organizers, paid to rally volunteers in spite of the futility, probably only if futility is guaranteed actually. Otherwise they’re Obama supporters, who assure everyone “This is what democracy looks like” and promise victory through electoral politics. Here’s a popular one: “El pueblo, Unido, Jamas sera vencido!” Really? Shout it with conviction all you want, it doesn’t make success inevitable. For English speakers who don’t drink the Koolaid that’s : The people, Kept busy, Run circles til they’re dizzy.

LOCKDOWN. The term has become ubiquitous, though lifted easily out of context, being self-explanatory. Its predecessor “batten down the hatches” used to be too. Before the advent of recreational sailing it came from a work environment synonymous with incarceration, in the days of debtors prison for penury, before which were slave galleys. As an idiom, batten the hatches still means to fasten things down, brace for difficult weather. “Lockdown” was used this week to describe the city of Boston, as its neighborhood of Watertown was swarmed by militarized police, the residents commanded to “shelter in place”, officers barking at them to stay in your houses, under penalty of being shot, by accident we like to suppose, for their own safety is the implication, or be arrested for obstructing justice. We’ve come to know what lock-down means. It’s a prison term for everyone stuck in their cell, until further notice, sometimes indefinitely. Colorado’s Supermax prison operates in a permanent state of lock-down. Of course in this age of school shootings –another self-defining expression, like “going postal”– lock-downs have become an educational tradition, and isn’t likening schools to prisons forcing an interesting slip into Freudian reality?

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It’s probably older than Latin. “De mortuis nil nisi bonum” is a propriety imposed at death, as if to offer the deceased a false comfort that, however fraudulent the pretense of their reputation in life, they can take it with them. Well, most commonly, “Don’t speak ill of the dead” is a reminder not to rehash petty grievances in the face of another’s mortality, death being after all mankind’s mutual adversary. It’s a pact I suppose that’s meant to benefit everyone equally. But the tradition does sort of cement history as written by the victor, where revisionists dare not speak truth to power while that authority is alive.
 
I saw the adage used in a disturbingly upbeat eulogy for Margaret Thatcher in this week’s New Yorker. Disturbing because it was fair handed enough, but mired like New York City, insulated by the growing wealth and cultural disparity, in the Western master narrative. I find that not speaking ill of the dead is completely irresponsible with historic figures like Margaret Thatcher and Henry Kissinger. If we are prevented from hanging them to hasten their death, we must at the minimum garrotte their memory before it’s set in stone. To beat a dead horse.

YES, MORE CSI DIY CROWDSOURCING PHOTO-ANALYSIS! If you could anticipate that criminologists would scrutinize surveillance videos for who left what at the scene, or who behaved oddly after a bomb blast, you could probably plan to evade detection, by, for example, bringing a larger bag to conceal the bag you’re going to drop off.

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“Former Pakistani military ruler Pervez Musharraf and his security team pushed past policemen and sped away from a court in the country’s capital on Thursday to avoid arrest after his bail was revoked in a case in which he is accused of treason.” Obviously that’s what a private security team is for. Dethroned Egyptian despot Mubarak proved it takes only a presidential physician to divert an accused mass murderer to a hospital instead of jail. Could such private Praetorian guards be protecting America’s criminal political class from federal law enforcement? We don’t know because we have yet to charge any of them.

By “power the world” does Time Magazine mean HEAT IT?! To a rolling boil? –How incredibly inane. This piece of rock’s jagged asymmetry (probably to differentiate it from a lump of coal – the other fossil fuel) and its other-earthly lighting, mean to suggest shale has a meteoric value. The disingenuous cover story, “why shale can solve the energy crisis”, is a curve ball pretending the problem is supply not demand, and FRACKING is the hero not the terminator. Let’s throw this projectile back like we would ordinary crowd control ordnance deployed to disorient waking masses. I think it’s fitting that Time has given its cover to a rock. In the hands of children it’s the bane of US and Israeli occupiers, it’s what defended Tahrir Square, and it will probably be the only sidearm we’ll be left to bear as our own occupiers try to forestall global revolution. But it’s enough.

TV NATION- Can Americans no longer embarrass themselves? This year’s pregame holiday extended to Super Bowl Eve with an un-ironic commemoration ceremony, an all-star gala tribute to football, acclaiming it a venerated touchstone of the American character, the public mob like drunken monks feasting the humanitarian contributions of the Spanish Inquisition. Football celebrates America’s cultural blood lust, a surrogate for our preemptive senseless war making, whose shared cartoon violence is expunged of its real antisocial inhumanity. Probably owing to this season’s pre pregame homophobia scandal, where collegiate casualty Manti Teo showed signs of early onset Mohammed Ali’s disease, fans learned about the concealed football side effect of compounded concussions, akin to IED survivors’ collateral brain damage. Next we’ll probably hear that footballers’ home lives spread PTSD. As football injuries become more difficult to hide from battle-weary audiences, fans will be calling for more Kevlar and then of course commensurate armor piercing anti-Kevlar. I already think football offensive lines look spectacularly under equipped without drones. Or would that position be pretended to play defense?

You know it’s GROUNDHOG DAY when newspaper weather forecasts read like articles in the Onion. The unseasonably warm winter that followed a record breaking hot summer has been declared by Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania’s mascot meteorologist to be an “Early Spring”. FOR NATURE. The rat.

OMG YES. OF COURSE. STOP THE VIOLENCE. Wait. By whose pinheaded definition? “Too many children are dying” exclaims Gabrielle Giffords! But looking into the eyes of these posterchild sociopaths, you know they’re only talking about domestic gun deaths, the collateral damage of our Western culture of violence. Time Magazine isn’t taking us yahoos to task on football, rape, enslavement and WAR. These three neo law-enforcers are not talking about American systemic acts of aggression, one Sandy Hook after the next behind the curtain of this theatrical “OUR children!” frenzy, the genocidal capitalist global war on people.

Who can say what is the cause? But this began in November when suddenly images on the Not My Tribe website would no longer appear alongside the NMT articles being crowd-aggregated by Facebook users. Now a link to our Snooze article failed to resolve into a post headline, instead remaining a raw http link, further reducing NMT’s visibility on the social network. If eventually we are completely blocked you won’t know it. Facebook is the new AOL. Already if a tree falls outside the shopping mall, America doesn’t hear it.

Lance Armstrong appeared on Oprah Winfrey’s Confessional TV franchise to admit he doped and lied. If Oprah polled her television audience for who should be next episode’s guest star, it might have to be Manti Te’o explaining that his dead fake internet girlfriend was a beard. Imagine the ratings if Oprah could book ex-dope-in-chief George W. Bush minus his minder Dick Cheney. Iraq’s fake WMDs would be the least of it.

So, no, the twenty schoolchildren killed at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown Connecticut were not Pakistani. That’s apparently what everyone is so upset about. I’m rather embarrassed how distraught Americans are about the Connecticut school shooting, considering equivalent child-massacres happen daily in Pakistan, victims of US drones, to no public outcry. In Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and all the far reaches of our multinational corporate empire, child killing is public policy, far from being a subject of public anguish.

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Remember the “Financial Crisis” from out of nowhere when Obama first came to office? Now it’s Bank Heist, the Sequel, branded most assuredly with the assistance of Madison Avenue as a “Fiscal Cliff”, shall we call it FC2? This time instead of extorting a so-called “bank bailout”, the oligarchs want austerity concessions. Having looted the public treasury, they’re after the public wealth we call government’s primary social benefit to which the public thought it was “entitled”. So our herders are crying FISCAL CLIFF hoping to divert the public beast to a real cliff, another Buffalo Jump, in urban terms, a shakedown.

If the Iron Dome works, Israel won’t have to retaliate after each Hamas rocket! These acts of desperation by the besieged Gazans, victims of Israel’s occupation, will become like the rocks thrown by Palestinian youth, futile. Hopefully Israel will expand its dome of impunity to protect Gazans too, from whoever is striking at them.

Dear Michael,
I write you as a longtime, enthusiastic fan, and please pardon me if the deference and affection I’d like to convey have been overcome by my shock at your recent emails. My question may sound rhetorical, but I would really like to know: what the hell compels you to shill once again for Barack Obama? Beside the campaign pablum.

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NOT A BIG IF. Who else can dictate austerity, deal justice with drones, and spout mendacious doublespeak without rousing a backlash?

A young prince who can do anything he wants, might go to war for some noble cause, if he hadn’t already exposed his and its deeply immoral character. After his Vegas binge, Prince Harry has returned to Afghanistan, his request this time to be a gunner on an Apache attack helicopter in the UK squad with the highest kill rate. It reminds me of the Hapsburg emperor who liked to shoot a peasant each day before breakfast –eventually his handlers had to enlist actors and load the old man’s rifle with blanks. We prefer to look back at old Franz Joseph as senile, but what is the truth about unrestricted inhuman whim?
 
A recent Taliban attack on Camp Bastion, Prince Harry’s base in the Helmund Province, may have been aimed at the bloodthirsty prince. Who can blame the Taliban for targeting a pro-war figurehead which the UK itself is exploiting? It could be however that Prince Harry’s secondary strategic benefit is not dissimilar to the American misuse of anti-Muhammad taunts to provoke insurgents. Drawing more Taliban fighters out of the shadows probably does not displease his royal trigger-happiness. Probably unarmed Austrians shared just as unfavorable odds as Afghans with AK-47s against Harry’s gunship. Let’s hope not.

Despite jingo media browbeating, Americans don’t remember 9/11. Or not how they’re supposed to. On the eleventh anniversary of the mystery of September 11, 2001, the political candidates mired in Election 2012 have decided not to commemorate Nine Eleven, because wouldn’t that be a wild card? Americans remember 9/11, but differently -and there’s the problem for politicos who adjust their pandering according to how it will be received by the electorate. You only want to Remember the Alamo or the Maine or Pearl Harbor if the public remembers the jingoist version of events, not what really happened come-to-light. In which case you don’t want a public remembering at all.

You don’t have to see it to believe it, reelect Pres. Obama FOR WAR.
 

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo.– Local voters have until next week to decide whether to accept the offer to lease the city’s Memorial Hospital to a University of Colorado non-profit entity, but there is no guarantee that the community health needs will continue to be met, in particular, that Memorial will continue to accept Medicare. Indications are not encouraging. At a symposium held tonight by 9 to 5 Colorado addressing privatization of public services, it was revealed that Memorial provides more care to indigents than any other hospital in the state. At the same time, the Denver hospital run by the University of Colorado currently ranks last there for indigent care. Apparently teaching hospitals prefer teachable cases, and excuse themselves from the cases that create billing difficulties because “it’s not their mission.” Alas, the prestige of becoming a teaching hospital is how politicians are selling the Memorial deal, now obviously dubious. And ordinarily the privatization of medical facilities in Colorado is regulated by what’s called a “conversion statute” except –it protects the public interest only in cases of hospitals sold, not leased! While a 40-year “lease” sounds less commital, it actually circumvents Colorado’s protections. Now let’s consider the implementation of President Obama’s Affordable Healthcare Act which may take some financial pressure off hospitals. Why-ever is Colorado Springs rushing to privatize before that card is face up? You can bet the medical industrialists have already factored that windfall into the profit they’re going to turn from cutting out everyone else who falls in the cracks. And we will have no say in the matter, because the lease makes that much clear. Why not ask our city attorney to confirm we’re screwed before the election and not after?

Mexico
 

Germany

He did it! Mitt Romney picked someone more low brow than Sarah Palin, and not just figuratively. Kleptocrat Representative Paul Ryan personifies the very definition of the idiom, Low Brow, coincidentally a eugenic measure of a diminutive frontal lobe, not unrelated to pea-brained under-evolvedness. Such a Frankenstinian VP pick for the GOP ticket, means our election stage managers are pulling out all stops to scare Democrats into the voting booths. That they keep having to make the Republican bogeyman ever bogeyer, could mean they anticipate enthusiasm for President Obama to reach new lows. What unspeakably unpopular move is coming from Goldman Sachs’ man in DC, dare we ask, that we’ll need Paul Ryan playing Goober Pyle Lugosi to frighten Americans back into Obama’s arms?

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo.- After President Obama’s campaign stop at Colorado College, the crowd clears, a reporter files his story, while an indiscreetly placed tree obstructs just enough of the Obama 2012 campaign logo to restore truth to the election season doublespeak. Does “forward” mean much more than the ol’ bla-bla-bla? –to quote a friend who heard his speech. Without the D you have “FOR WAR” which makes a lot more sense, and that “D” stood for Democrat.