Monthly Archives: June 2006

The Irreligious Christian Right

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I wanted to call them Christians with a capital H, but they’re not hypocritical per se. American evangelicals do not profess to do good, merely they pledge to do good by Jesus Christ. Meaning, what their preacher tells them, that the scripture tells them, that Jesus tells them to do. Go spread my faith, in a nutshell.

If you believe in Jesus you will be saved. If you do not believe in Jesus you cannot be saved. They turn this to mean do whatever you want, Jesus will forgive you. Thus, abusing the bejesus out of the ten commandments, does not enter into it, you’re saved! Kill pygmies, enslave them, starve them or ignore them, no harm done! Extra credit however if you convert them.

Traditional religions share this religiosity: an idea of benevolence toward your fellow man. Progressive religious thought embraces all religion as serving a same higher purpose.

This is where it’s important to draw a distinction between denominations. American christian evangelicals are not religious in this fundamental way. They are not at the core do-gooders. And they do not play well with others.

To say of a capital “C” Christian, well at least he believes in God, is like saying of a member of the Bloods or the Crips, well at least it keeps him off the street.

Not your mother’s I.E.D.

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An insurgency in its last throes? Even to call Iraqi weapons improvised, as in IEDs, is to lie about the strength of the Iraqi insurgency -or as some would say- resistance. These “Improvised Explosive Devices,” are not so improvised at all. And they’ve been responsible for the high US casualty rate for over a year now.

The British press is calling them what they are, EFPs, Explosively Formed Projectiles otherwise known as shaped charges, neither crude nor home made.

These mines are concealed next to thoroughfares and are capable of piercing armor, even tanks. They are machined on lathes by skilled weapons makers, probably in Iran.

An Iran connection is the hay the British media may be trying to make with this story. The bigger significance is this: to say our troops are suitably protected against such improvised weapons is a lie.

   Not an improvised weapon

Maybe there is no al-Qaeda?

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Try this on for size: the war on terror is being used to justify all forms of restrictive government controls, from surveillance to union-busting to torture. Lacking any terrorist acts of late, how do we know there are even terrorists? Except that our government keeps scooping them up, putting them in Guantanamo, but it won’t let us see them.

Is Guantanamo really about keeping certain Islamic “illegal combatants” from doing harm? As the overwelming number of detainees are released without charges, it’s hard to believe the authorities cared who they had detained. Perhaps Guantanamo has been serving to perpetuate the myth that such terrorists exist at all.

Arbitrary interments function to terrorize a populace (a reason why they’re violations of international law), but perhaps the US has an additional purpose. What if there is no major league AL Qaeda except for the fictional assemblage at Guantanamo? Perhaps we’ve not been allowed a close look at the captives at Guantanamo lest we detect that there is no rhyme or reason to those detained.

There has been most certainly a group of Islamic Fundamentalists who orchestrated the 1990 attack the WTC, the bombing of the USS Cole, the bombing of the US embassy buildings in Nairobi, and other bombing in Southeast Asia. And on 9/11/2001 a group of Saudi Arabians flew two airplanes into the WTC, although likely with assistance.

But that’s probably about it. With a dozen or so hijackers dying on 9/11, another dozen usual suspects rounded up in Pakistan and Indoneasia, and poster boy Osama traipsing about Afghanistan, there might not have been any more.

A “war on terror” requires enemy terrorists. If there are no further acts of terrorism, how are you going to assert that there are still terrorists out there? Why not incarcerate a bunch of guys who dress like terrorists and take credit for intervening with their dastardly plans? Plus you’ll be asserting that if you have some, there must be more.

But the stories coming out of those released from Guantanamo indicate that US security agencies are simply playing a cruel games with individual world citizens. Why have such detainees been denied access to the world? Isn’t it more appropriate to say that the world is being denied access to the detainees? Maybe it’s the outside world that the US is trying to keep out of Guantanamo. Otherwise people of reason could unravel the fiction of Al Qaeda.

Organic food judged by the label

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You can judge a book by its cover if the book’s edible and the judgement has to do with how it tastes.

Detractors of organic products like to criticise the label as if it’s some sort of scam. And they’re right, organic labels are hard to enforce. And getting harder. Big agra wants a piece of the organic produce market, and they’re fighting to dumb down the regulations so that they can label their usual crap organic.

But the argument that you cannot trust the organic appelation only flies with a dumbed down public. An organic apple tastes organic. That’s really a lot of the point. It’s healthier, yes, and it tastes quite a bit better.

The general public needs to be told it seems what a food is, because food no longer tastes much like it used to. You have to look at what it says on the bag for example to identify a red delicious.

It occurs to me that Koolaid presented an early challenge like this. You could only taste that it was red. You had to look at the package to see if it was cherry, strawberry, rasberry or none of the above.

Light summer fare

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Congressman Westmoreland do-nothingHere are some wonderful video clips, if you haven’t seen them already:
 
1. Georgia congressman Lynn Westmoreland wants to post the Ten Commandments in the halls of congress, if only to be reminded of them himself. Here he is in an interview with Stephen Colbert.

2. If you haven’t seen it yet, Stephen Colbert’s address to the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner. While you’re at it, read Colbert’s follow-up commencement speech.

3. Jon Stewart spars with Republican Party Chairman Ken Mehlman, and empathizes with him because “you have to spray perfume on the turds.”

4. Ask-a-Ninja explains net neutrality.

5. A David Copperfield sendup and an amazing juggling finale.

The sub-urban myth of low cost recycling

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An urban untruth we can stop lying to ourself about would be recycling. Right now we can chose to separate our refuse in hope that we will be contributing less to the local landfill. From the regular garbage, we pull paper, plastic and aluminum and place them in separate containers.

The unsavory truth is that our garbage service recombines those elements into a single mess and takes it straight to the landfill. It’s quite an additional expense to actually recycle material and the waste management companies are not about to bear that cost themselves. Unless we are paying quite a bit more to have our waste recycled, it’s not going to happen.

Sharing our neighborhoods with nature is a sub-urban myth

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Urban myths are stories too amazing to be disbelieved. Here’s a sub-urban myth which we want so much to believe. The myth of sharing our neighborhoods with their original animal inhabitants.

If one of nature’s varmints is disturbing your domestic bliss, you can choose to remove him. Most of us like to think there is a human to do this. You can catch racoons in a live trap, same with skunk, or any other indigenous critter which you have deemed a pest, but you cannot release them into the wild. Using a live trap just takes the killing out of your hands. The animals will be euthanised. That’s the harsh reality.

If you rent the trap yourself, or borrow one from a neighbor, trap the little feller yourself and drive him twenty miles afield, you may be breaking the law. In fact, unless you are releasing him into another suburban neighborhood, you are breaking the law. There’s a very good reason for this. Wild animals who’ve comingled their food and feces with domestic animals are likely carriers of domestic deseases. To release them into the wild would mean contaminating the wild populations.

About the only honorable course of action we might consider could be to accept that we cohabit with our fellow critters and let them be.

Making Iraqi soldiers

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Iraqis have mastered rocket scienceUS troops are training Iraqis to be soldiers? Is that a laugh? Iraqi soldiers are already some of the most experienced in the world, many of them veterans of the ten year war with Iran and the Gulf War.
 
Iraqi fighters have shown their mettle against the overwhelming superiority of their American occupiers, twice. What do soft bellied Americans have to teach to seasoned Iraqis?

Indoctrination would be more like it. Inoculate them with vaccines, get their pledge of allegiance, record their identifying marks and family records, start a file on them, arm them with cast-off assault rifles, teach them our weapons systems I suppose, though I’m guessing not.

What ARE we teaching them? Is the timetable needed to train an Iraq security force really the time it takes to just assemble one? To convince enough Iraqis that they aren’t signing up for just one paycheck because that’s the only payday they’ll experience before they are summarily disgorged from an army bus and executed? Are Iraqi men given the choice of conscription or Abu Ghraib?

Israel ends cease-fire in Occupied Territories

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US mainstream media reports that Hamas has decided to end its cease-fire on account of a recent Israeli gun-boat attack upon Palestinian beach-goers. This follows a day after a top Palestinian government official was assassinated by an Israeli air strike.
 
Who might it be said was breaking the cease-fire?

Zarqawi character killed off

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US military press liasons have decided to claim some headway in Iraq by discontinuing the Abu Musab al ZarqawiTM character.
 
The world first heard of al-Zarqawi when Nicholas Berg was beheaded in a widely circulated video which coincided with the emergence of the Abu Ghraib photos. Although the video appeared to conceal western soldiers disguised as hooded Islamic militants, US spokesmen insisted the principle sword-bearer among them was “Zarqawi,” head of al Qaeda In Iraq. To this day, most Iraqis do not believe there was any AQII, nor that it might be lead by any “Zarqawi,” unless of course it exists as an American fabrication.

The Iraqi people rejoice today at the killing of “Zarqawi” because there should now be fewer 500-lb bombs being dropped on unsuspecting households in what has been the ongoing attempt to kill the mystical insurgent. While it is being reported that this successful strike annihilated an entire house and all its occupants, why is no reporter asking how many households have been obliterated by the previous air strikes?

Meanwhile, the US media is making a curiously pointless effort to report that though Zarqawi expired immediately when US troops arrived on the scene, he had been captured alive. Is this to say, as opposed to on ice? Cold storage is where many critics had suspected an al Zarqawi corpse might have been biding its time.

Maybe the time had become ripe. Having failed to resuscitate their approval ratings with the old gay-marriage attack, George W.’s party sure needed to pull something else out of the hat. Behold ol’ Zarqawi, with blown-up pictures a la Che Guevara.

Everyone from President Bush on up through the media seem to find it important too to point out that Zarqawi’s departure from the insurgency line-up will not mean a reduction of activity on the part of the Iraq resistance movement. Would this be because Zarqawi wasn’t actually responsible for any of it before his demise?

Jordanian man of mystery, Abu Musab al Zarqawi’s only verifiable action was to be know by the US military spokesmen to be Saddam Hussein’s link to al Qaeda. His Iraqi organization’s name was thoughtfully bi-lingual and idiot-proof: al Qaeda In Iraq, previously known as S.P.E.C.T.R.E.

Ignoranuses

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What are you if you do not know the bad you are doing, or justify it because the best you can do right now is follow orders? Are you guilty of bank robbery if you only drove the getaway car?
 
Did you murder the children in Haditha if you merely delivered the mail to the person who serves the food to the person who shuffled the paperwork for the person who maintained the landing gear of the plane which flew the Bradley Armored Vehicle which carried the soldiers to Haditha to execute the women, children and fathers in the head at point blank range?

Aren’t you a little bit ignorant to believe that you played not an insignificant part in enabling that tragic crime among countless others? Aren’t you somewhat quite the asshole for rationalizing an excuse for yourself?

Go to the brig and serve your time sooner than facilitate more crime against humanity. You are not powerless, you can say no. It will require tremendous self-sacrifice, but the hardships will pale in comparison to the dishonor with which you are already going to live.

Short term life expectancy

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This week 1,500 Army reservists from the 2nd Brigade, 1st Armored Division are being ordered from Kuwait to join the embattled Marines in Iraq’s Anbar province. Their commander General Casey assured us this deployment will be short-term. “Definitely short-term” he reiterated.
 
With casualty rates so high, is the general’s confidence based on the soldier’s probable life expectancy?

A Freudian mixed metaphor for the GOP

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elephant gorillaI’ve read it several times now, the eight-hundred pound gorilla in the room. This would seem to confuse 1) the proverbial 600-900 lb primate (gorillas not named Kong seldom excede 400 lbs) who outclasses everyone else in size and power, for 2) the pachyderm in the room whose relative mass overwhelms our capacity to ignore it, though we try.
 
In this corporate age of Darwinian monopolies, maybe the de facto brutality of alpha-male corporate monopoly has become something the corporate media mouthpieces won’t let us talk about. There’s an elephant in the room, and the three hundred pound gorilla won’t let us talk about it.
 
The gorilla is the elephant is the new metaphor for the GOP.