Monthly Archives: August 2006

The dark side of white music

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What’s insidious about Country & Western Music? I’ll tell you. I thought I was just incensed at its hypocrisy because it rewards multimillionaire entertainers for talking like hicks. Country singers pretend to be simpleton hillbillies, possessed maybe with down-home smarts, but really they are finely-honed corporate media assets.

That used to just burn me up. The lying tight-jeaned shits, selling America on poverty vices like alcohol, tobacco and firearms while appearing to champion the little man. Honoring the blue-collar joe while keeping him down.

The worse consequence of Country Music has not shown itself until recent times, now that we have conservative hayseeds -or appear to have- good ol’ boys in charge of everything. Pretty abruptly we can see the danger of idolizing dim-witted cowpokes.

Country Music elevates and ascribes a kind of wisdom to dumb in-bred kids who eschew school lernin. To them it’s all about thinking from your gut, hell, thinking while drunk. It’s drinking wisdom, commonsensical wisdom, the wisdom of seeing no further than your own holler, of black and white issues and ass-kicking diplomacy.

That’s the damn insidious result of worshiping a west that never was, and a motto that is not real. That’s the uncomplicated, eternally pubescent world of Country Music.

America is a nation dominated by a low common denominator. It gets lower every day as people grow dumber from pellagra malnutrition and being left behind by our education system. That denominator has an anthem: Country & Western Music.

It’s the same melody, the same guitar riff, the same build, the same harmony. You can hum it the first time you hear it because it’s the same song. And it always says:

I’m proud to be a [dumbshit],
Where at least I know [what do I know?]
Bla bla bla [we’ll shit on whoever we please],
Bla bla bla God Bless the [arian nation of dumbfucks]!

Private philanthropy

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I was recently introduced to a young couple, both 21 years old, proud parents of a month-old baby. They live in low-income housing, dad works a joe job. . .mom stays home, no friends or family nearby, to take care of baby.

Is this an untenable situation? YOU BET IT IS! American society requires that we become rugged individualists. . .nuclear families reign supreme and exist in a vacuum of our own making. In the days of yore, mother/grandmother/sister were omnipresent. . .helping with practical matters but, more importantly, providing guidance and wisdom and support in navigating life’s tricky waters. WHERE IS MY RED TENT?

Wanna make a difference? We have lots of opportunities. We can bankroll large ventures that help people help themselves. We can write and protest and travel the world looking for the downtrodden. . .hoping to shine some light on injustice.

But another option is to look a bit closer to home. Speak some kind words, bring a dinner, offer to babysit, share your experiences, your wealth, your time. I BELIEVE in private philanthropy. I believe that anyone who comes across my path presents a challenge to me, an opportunity for me. Maybe it’s all my years spent in uniform as a Catholic girl but an old song keeps playing in my head. “All that I am. All that I do. All that I’ll ever have I offer now to you.”

Minutemen Civil Defense Klan in hindsight

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COLORADO SPRINGS- I had the pleasure Tuesday night to attend a membership recruiting meeting for a Minuteman border protection group. About fifty citizens turned up, with a collective IQ of probably about that. Lots of people eager to use their handguns against brown usurpers of American land, jobs and social programs.

Yesterday's bigotsProtect our border because the Federal Government won’t do it. Protect it against immigrants, Hepatitis B, Drug-resistant TB, drugs, rape & pillage (seriously) and terrorism. The pitch was big on the threat of terrorism, 9/11 and all.

We knew they were bigots because they didn’t care a lick about the Canadian border. My friend Mark Lewis and I were going to show up in Klan robes, to mix it up and mock their bigoted enthusiasm, but we got there late and copped out.

The meeting was held at a police station of all places. We were going to make a stink about that, but didn’t.

In fact I spent the whole meeting trying to think of pointed questions but didn’t say a peep. And worse, when a protestor stood up and disrupted the presentation I didn’t chime in with words of support. He was pelted with insults and led out of the room with his young daughter. I felt very bad that she would have been hurt by the universal condemnation of her dad’s heroism. I do so hope to run into the two again someday.

By the way, the man was called out of the room by the officer in charge at the Falcon Police Sub-station, Sargent Rob Kelly who had I guess appointed himself bouncer to the public meeting. The protestor’s comments were disruptive but not obstructive. The minuteman spokesman didn’t ask to be assisted, the officer abruptly jumped in.

Mark and I had decided our presence would be most effective after the meeting, providing an opposing voice interview to the TV crew. It worked out, the TV crew was just as repulsed as we at the presence of such trigger-happy white people meeting in a police station community room.

In hindsight, I might have some suggestions for effective communication disruptors, if the goal is to dissuade as many of the attendees as possible from signing up with the Minutemen. If you get a chance to attend one of these meetings, here are a couple tactics you might consider.

Don’t do the KKK robes, they won’t let you in the meeting and the satire will be lost on them. Instead wear a t-shirt with the vintage Klan poster depicting Uncle Sam saying “I want you to join the Klan.” Later in the slideshow the Minutemen have the same image but this time it says “I want you to join the Minutemen.”

The first thing the Minutemen do in their presentation is try to dispel the idea that they appeal to bigots. If you are motivated by racial or cultural hatred, they ask you to please leave. Now. I so wish that I’d chosen that uncomfortably silent moment to stand up and walk out, well almost out, before saying “just kidding!”

The rest of the meeting was just more cheap manipulation, with little room to question the truck-sized fallacies in their fear-mongering. Questions were only solicited well past the emotional appeals. Laughter might have cracked the reverential manner in which the audience absorbed the bombastic presentation.

A strange point: There’s a $50 fee for applicants who require a security check before being accepted. The fee is waived for anyone who has a handgun permit. I wonder if the Minutemen are interested in you if you don’t have a gun. How then would they expect you to shoot Mexicans?

Do you have any questions you’d like to ask the Minutemen?

Standing against veiled bigotry

Here comes Hurricane Che

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The Red Peril at our shoresGoogle it. “Ernesto.” See what you get: Ernesto the hurricane and Ernesto Che Guevara. This season’s brightest prospect for an action weather spectacular has been given a decidedly un-American name.
 
To me it’s reminiscent of the 2004 season when the National Weather Service would not conceal its election year partisanship. The 2004 hurricane names alluded to three countries which led the opposition to our planned Iraq invasion. Frances, Ivan, Karl. Not to say anything about last year’s villain, invoking a perennial nemesis, “Katrina.”
 
It’s coincidence no doubt, but as Hurricane Ernesto was downgraded to a Tropical Depression, Jeb Bush still kept Florida in a state of emergency because as he said, “a hurricane is a hurricane.” Doesn’t it sound like he’s talking about a commie?

The boogeyman looming in this hemisphere is the growing Latin American sovereignty movement led by Castro, Chavez and Morales. It’s the Red Menace at our shores.

What next from our Minutemen at the National Weather Service? Hurricane Fidel? Tropical Depression [Subcomandante] Marcos?

Such a guilty pleasure

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But let me share it with you!

The other afternoon I was crossing a quiet street on the West Side and heard behind me the thump of something dropped to the pavement, followed by a man’s surprised curse. “Shit.” I turned to see a broken twelve-pack carton and beer cans slowly rolling in all directions from their impact point in the dead center of a four-way stop. A man on a bicycle was stopped in his tracks above them.

A man above teenage years, riding a bicycle without a helmet or spandex apparel, has a DUI. That’s what he’s doing without a car.

An otherwise scruffy man on a shiny kid’s mountain bike has been through the Salvation Army Rehabilitation Program. Working in their center or doing community service in a thrift store is an easy way to score a bicycle. Insiders get first choice, even if the donations are intended for impoverished children.   Sobriety and religion

A grown man riding home from the liquor store at three in the afternoon carrying a case of beer has graduated from the recovery program and been assisted with his own apartment from which to make a fresh start. That’s my guess.

So it was with guilty satisfaction that I turned my head from watching as cars backed up at the stop sign to wait while this fellow scrambled after his booty without even a bag into which to gather it.

No free TV

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Television used to be free. They were the public airwaves and the networks were given the use of those airwaves so long as they were serving the public good. What’s happened?

Now the public airwaves are full of television shows we cannot stomach. All the advertized programming is carried by cable stations for which viewers have to pay.

Now the NFL has its own network and more and more of its games will be available only through pay-per-view. Football teams that are subsidized by municipal and state taxes are withholding their performances unless they are paid-per-view.

To mix a metaphor with a pun: I hope this will be the shit that breaks the fan.

Celebrities to soothe airport terror anxiety

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In an airport the other day I overheard Connie Chung making an announcement. Our national threat level is elevated to Orange apparently, further precautions are necessary, etc, etc, please report any suspicious activity to the TSA.

Was that Connie Chung’s voice? Why? What was wrong with the usual anonymous voice paging John Smith, paging Mister John Smith? Was a celebrity voice necessary? Did her publicist get Connie the gig, was it a court ordered community service, or did the Department of Homeland Security feel a familiar yet authorative voice was a necessary means to ease passenger suspicion that they are the dupes?

So here was Connie Chung doing her part to calm the travelling masses being led to their ignoble fate of unreasonable suspicion. I don’t know why, I thought of Judas Goats in the slaughterhouses. Does Connie have to Fedex a recording to the TSA at each elevation of the Threat Level?

Now I remember seeing Homeland Security TSA infomercials starring a variety of famous comedians, playing on monitors above the first post-911 lines awaiting the beefed-up airport security. So you laugh off, or shrug off while laughing, the indignity of being told to take off your shoes for the inspectors. Most people bring flip-flops to the gym navigate the few steps from the locker room to the showers lest they contract someone else’s athlete’s foot. These same people are being forced to share foot fungus with thousands more public soles than they are accustomed.

As I was about to board the airplane, I was called out for an additional search by a TSA officer. By called out, I do not mean approached, nor addressed. He simply barked “Sir. Step over here.” He may have said please, I do not remember it in his abruptness. Instead I was looking beside me to see to whom he might have been addressing his command. Maybe I had come in after he had begun with a salutation as is customary when strangers initiate communication. Having seen no one beside me, I looked back at the uniformed TSA guy in time for him to shout “STEP OVER HERE!”

I’m of course only about to respond “Who? Me?” but he’s already talking over me shouting his order again. I was left with no option but to offer my hasty compliance.

I’d have to say I was too startled to fuss about his manners, and I was eager to get aboard the plane, but I would otherwise have loved to mess with this little tin-pot jerk.

I had no objection to being frisked again, or to having my bag searched once more for whatever items I may have purchased from Southland Corporation in the terminal after the last security check. But I will not be shouted at. No.

And my thoughts return to the celebrities trying to facilitate our compliance. I’m reminded of Tadeusz Borowski’s memoir of the concentration camps “This way to the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen.”

Right wing imprimaturs

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Il Duce in a blue dressDid the Neocons flat out buy the National Geographic? It was a brilliant coup.
 
If you were to have asked yourself what periodical has been the most trusted and revered, it would have been the Geographic.
 
Right behind hobbiest zines like Popular Mechanics I suppose, and Hearst’s PM too falls suspiciously in the conservative think-tank stable.

With so much of the world, and the natural word ablaze, the Geographic has avoided showing the flames, maintaining it doesn’t want to take a political stand. (Besides its photogenic depiction of America’s war machine in Iraq.)
 
Everything, even nature, is political. These days, to be a-political means to endorse the status quo. That’s decidedly political.
 
I can see their upcoming take on authoritarian oligopoly: FASCISM: IT’S THE NATURAL ORDER.

Dog and pony sex show

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Little JonBenet Ramsey’s killer has been found. How many stories like JonBenet are on the back burner, waiting for a lull in the news or for the need for a distraction from the news?

How fortuitous that just as a ceasefire is achieved in Lebanon and journalists can finally go back into the country and document the devastation and atrocity and humanitarian disaster and unexploded cluster bombs, suddenly there’s a story on the TV that overtakes every other practically twenty-four-seven.

And this one has an icky factor beyond credulity. A pre-op transgendered pedophile 2nd grade teacher, whose own father thought him dead “I thought somebody would have killed him by now,” who’s been harboring a JonBenet fetish, AS HAS THE REST OF AMERICA OBVIOUSLY, a macabre fascination with imagining a dolled-up mini-tyke in her death throes.

This guy tells the authorities that he was present at JonBenet’s death so he’s yanked out of a Thai jail were he was awaiting charges on some other perverse impropriety.

Now his motives can be pretty muddy. Maybe he wanted to escape the sordid fate of a Thai jail cell. Or maybe he wants to see himself finally linked to the object of his fixation. He gets to be the protagonist in his fantasy of JonBenet’s last breaths. It’s the old high school ploy, isn’t it? If he couldn’t have JonBenet, he’ll settle for the world thinking he had her.

I’m not saying Karr-creep didn’t kill JonBenet. I’m only suggesting that this story’s ick factor should have kept it from soiling our television viewing until something of the voracity of his claims were shown to be valid. And the ick-factor increases as we realize that the media circus is only bringing this gentleman closer to orgasm.

I’m saying that if you or I phoned the police or the media to say we knew where Jimmy Hoffa’s body was buried, we’d get a bite. But if we added that we kept Hoffa in our freezer between necrophilic bouts, or that we killed him because he did not address us by our proper name Napoleon Bonaparte, the cameras might have given pause to let mental health officials sort things out.

There’s plenty of ugliness out there, very little of it deserves front-page attention and for the most part it doesn’t surface. When Geraldo was standing in front of that basement brick wall in Chicago, the supposed site of Al Capone’s vault, ready to show the world what was behind it, he may not have known what he was going to find. But you can be certain his network had already made sure it wasn’t going to be a crack whore’s alley or heroin addict’s den.

Or a dog and pony sex act, unless there is a call for one.

Subterfuge8.28 UPDATE
Bill Mahr spelled it out last night. JonBenet was a diversion from Lebanon atrocities.

Now Jeffrey Dahmer Karr has been unmasked as but JonBenet’s aspiring rapist. But the public is still left slimed by having attended to his sadistic fantasy. People who read James Patterson or Thomas Harris ask to bathe their imaginations in dark pools of that ilk, the rest of us do not.

Don’t blame the Boulder D.A., blame the MSM pornographers.

Little shit

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picture 
 
Speaking of shit. Is it time to resurrect a prank played on our president when he visited Europe in 2003?
 
Before Bush paid his visit, clever Belgians and French took little party favor flags in Bush’s image and stuck them into the nearest available sidewalk tributes to his image.

You can do this too, or bring your own, to set around wherever Bush is travelling in his campaign against opposition voices.
 
It’s not feces-slinging, or calling our president names like war criminal, or idiot, or corrupt autist-maniac who steals from the poor to give to the rich. This is not like addressing Bush as the chimp-in-chief. It’s based solely on his misbehavior and his unseemly and uncaring motives. Even his mother would have to admit it’s a little bit true.

Bullshit making instructions

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Writing an column for Crank Magazine some years ago, I announced my intention to describe how to make a bomb. Crank Magazine took out a newspaper ad in the local daily to publicize the upcoming issue , mentioning the forthcoming bomb recipe. As a result we received letters and legal threats warning us not to reveal bomb-making secrets to the public at large.

The point of my article was not just to dispel the impression that bomb making was easy, but to argue the importance of the public’s access to that information. Several publishers had been hounded for their efforts to keep THE ANARCHIST’S COOKBOOK in print. The instructions are relatively simple to understand, but to execute them is another matter.

My point was illustrated by last week’s fantasy bomb plot. British and American authorities scared us with descriptions of dark skinned operatives sneaking aboard transatlantic flights armed with bottles of liquid bomb ingredients. If enough of us were conversant in basic chemistry, we could debunk such sky-is-falling wolf-crying. The Register has sorted out what it would take to successfully make an explosive from liquids smuggled aboard by airline passengers.

Several American columnists have now alluded to the Register article, but without the customary hyperlink. Perhaps they are still fearing to call attention to explicit chemistry instruction. I think that’s still playing gatekeeper with knowledge. Let the poorly-educated American public, too hung-over in highschool to have gotten anything out of early morning chemistry lab, understand what is required to make a bomb in an airplane lavatory: a miracle.

Rules of engagement for Lebanon peacekeepers

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Concerned nations await clear rules of engagement before agreeing to send soldiers to keep peace between Israel and Lebanon. Israel has opposed ceasefire terms because they would inhibit Israel’s opportunity to deal blows to Hisb’Allah. Here are perhaps peacekeeping orders the Israelis could approve:

Do not fire your weapons unless you are fired upon. Shoot Muslims at will.

Apple Pan unchanged since 1947 or 1987

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Apple Pan Restaurant on Pico Boulevard across from the Los Angeles West Side Pavilion Mall
This is my favorite eatery in LA. You stand along the wall until there’s a seat free at the counter. You’re breathing down their necks, actually. Luckily those seated are eating at the pace they are being served. Fast. The guy working the counter will keep your glass topped, pour the ketchup for your fries, even draw a napkin out of the dispenser as he sees you reach for it. In one fluid movement he’s reached your mouth before you do, or it feels that way.

The burgers are legendary, served in paper wraps that stand them on end, the easier to bite. Hickory sauce is standard. The lettuce is cut in wedges. You can’t visit the Apple Pan without having their apple pie, UNLESS you order one to take home, and chose instead to have a slice of the banana cream pie for desert.

Remembering Hiroshima and Nagasaki

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have we become the evil we deploreWe held a protest today at the front gate of Peterson Air Force Base. It was to commemorate the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 61 years ago. It’s an annual remembrance.
 
The event also offers us a chance to reflect on the lunacy of nuclear weapons.
 
The protest was lost on the airmen who drove through the gate leaving the base. None of them seem to know what date it is. Let alone that it represents a tragic milestone for mankind.

Vigils are not kept for the equal number of Japanese civilians killed by conventional weapons, fire-bombed before we had nukes. American bombers annihalated entire Japanese cities, including 60% of Tokyo, in a deliberate effort to kill Japanese civilians.

US Postal Service eco-unfriendly

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Remember the eco-revolution of the 1970s? Recycling was the rage. Manufacturers cut down on packaging.

The USPS does not remember those days. Not only do they require the use of their packaging materials for Priority service, but you can’t recycle their packaging. They spent extra ink to print on the reverse side of their boxes, words to the effect that you cannot re-use their boxes with the reverse side out.

Shipping boxes you can't use

Police state

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Ready to pounceIn Norway you can’t speed or run a light anywhere without getting a ticket. In Norway they have cameras mounted sporadically along the roadways so you have no choice but to drive properly. Even on a country road, even if you’re running late, it makes no sense to break the law and that’s rather stress-averting in itself.

As a result there are no police cars in sight. Thus Norway has order and civility, without law enforcement authorities loitering to catch you.

It’s an interesting trade-off. Big brother -in a bureaucratic sense- instead of beat cops. It reduces the possibility of human error, personality clashes, power trips, graft, or whatever other motive led that officer to a career in law enforcement.

British police officers, Bobbies, are required to wear the funny get-ups to counter the natural impulse a law enforcer might get to act too authoritively. Until recently most Bobbies were not even allowed to carry weapons.

In this country, the policemen’s Ray-bans, other masculine accouterments, and the big gun serve to promote machismo power tripping. Good for them, but not so terribly great for you. In American, even when you are behaving yourself, a person can’t help the reflex of holding their breath when they cross the path of law enforcement officers.

Have you noticed that they’re multiplying? More tickets mean greater revenue for police departments, mean more officers, means a police state.

9-11, 9-11, 9-11, 9-11

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Want to keep bringing up 9-11 bright boys?At a precinct meeting to suggest planks for the Democratic Party platform, a friend of mine was stuck on 9-11 truth telling. He’d like to write it on a blimp. I agreed but argued, first things first.
 
Anti-war first I said, then a Democratic majority in Congresss, then time to re-investigate 9-11. What condescension. I told him that I thought a truthful account of 9-11 would be too hard to swallow.
 
Since the party convention, and since this summer’s 9-11 breast-beating, I am absolutely certain that I was wrong. Ninety nine percent of Americans don’t work in skyscrapers, nor do they cross the Atlantic on airliners, yet the fall of the WTC threatened their sense of security. The myth of their insecurity has got to fall.
 
9-11 is still the GOP rallying cry. We must take it from them because we will not win an election without decrying their lie.
 
It’s our 9-11 crackpot theory versus their 9-11 crackpot fable. If the simple folk cannot swallow this, do we think they will buy black box voting or our American tradition of malevolent multinational corporate imperialism?

Restarting economy with repurchased toiletry items

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Never mind that the London plotters never got beyond plotting. Never mind that the likely success of their bomb smuggling strategy is yet unproved. Already the Department of Homeland Security has decreed that no one can take liquids or gels aboard a plane.

If the NSA should eavesdrop upon another group of dark skinned men discussing the smuggling of incindiary devices made out of toothpicks, no matter how improbable, would toothpicks then be banned?

To combust a passenger aircraft with explosives stored in contact cleaning fluid bottles would require two soccer teams of suicide brethren pooling their resources in a probably pretty conspicuous Islamic in-flight Tupperware party.

And now the foiled terrorist plot is looking like it was a hoax.
 
This latest Neocon fear-mongering looks more like a baby steps approach to increasing consumer spending. They’re giving up on the everybody-buy-a-hybred industrial initiative.
 
Instead they’re forcing airline passengers to repurchase the personal products they need at each destination. Are the conservatives thinking they will bolster consumer spending one plane load of toiletry items at a time? 		  picture

Digital reproduction of aluminum

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1. Aluminum Siding
In the German film epic HEIMAT, an unscrupulous brother brags about the lucrative post-war business of aluminum siding. Barry Levinson’s 1987 TIN MEN depicted the same competitive salesmanship arena stateside. In Germany the aluminum siding industry was more of a scam because the aluminum wasn’t covering clapboard houses.

In Germany the salesmen were offering aluminum siding to replace historic decorative trim. Modern aluminum doors and window frames were being offered to replace old-world crafted wood pieces. The same salesman installing shiny new aluminum were warehousing the original antique pieces for resale to more savvy consumers.

Aluminum has been the wonder material with the cache of being aeronautic light and rust free. But took a hit when aluminum cooking ware was linked to alzheimer’s.

Element Digit2. Digital a new aluminum
Is digital the new miracle element on the alchemist’s Periodic Table? Is it better than its representative predecessor, analog? A digital watch might be easier to read than an analog dial because you don’t have to learn how to convert the information. But digital time is not really as versatile from a distance, or at an angle, or upside down.
 
But so it began. Digital is cheaper to manufacture, no mechanical parts, and without it we would not have computers. Computers rung in the digital age. Thus the digital halo.

Next up for the consumer, digital sound, and next, digital visuals. That’s where digital’s ascendancy may stumble.

Are digital compact discs indeed better than vinyl records? Music audiophiles will tell you no. Let’s revisit that question in a moment.

Who is convinced that digital cell phones are better than analog? Cheaper to make certainly, cheaper to broadcast, the recordings are easier to archive. Better for the telecoms, but for you? Digital cellphone service means more drop-outs and degraded signals. Remember when you could say, “wow, it sounds like you’re in the next room”? That wasn’t digital. Digital is the age of “can you hear me now? Um, how about now?”

I am not sitting in judgment of the potential of digital representation obviously, merely of cheap digital representation. With the technology of digital processing came fuzzy logic and compression. Each innovation was designed to reduce the digital reproduction to its most efficient lowest quality necessary.

CDs reproduce music for the average not so discerning ear. Sony’s Minidiscs reduced the complexity of the signal for what they determined the average ear could discern in the midst of car or jogging noises. MP3s filter out further signals based on the user’s own sense of what quality is good enough.

3. Digital is unnatural
It turns out we’re all a little more discerning with our vision. We can easily tell the difference between film and video. The film image is richer, warmer and more lifelike. Video is higher contrast and more stark. On the Internet we can all recognize compression artifacts and noise, even if we don’t know it by name. We see it because it does not look natural. That’s digital compression and it’s creeping into TV and DVD products because it’s cheaper for someone along the line.

Do we mind digital images? I guess not. Do we prefer them? No.

Musicians prefer the more natural sounds produced by analog amplifiers. Of course everyone is trying to represent the original, natural sound.

We can see the unnatural aspects of digital imagery. It may hurt our vision or it may not. Perhaps we can deduce that our ears are being assailed with similar digital mediocrity. So far it’s only the discriminating audiophiles who liken digital reproduction to nails on a chalkboard. Until it’s linked to Alzheimer’s.

Black gloves

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Standard GI uniformCan somebody explain the psychology of our boys in their black gloves? Am I too distracted by the bad-guy movie image? Black gloves remind me of hired assassins, mafioso, bad cops, sadists, interrogators and torturers.
 
Did I miss any good guys who wear black gloves? Scuba divers? Al Jolsen?

The French para-military sent to put down the Algerian Islamic freedom fighters wore black gloves. They were notorious torturers. Did the gloves have to be black to hide the blood?

The Gestapo wore black gloves. And before them Hessian mercenaries. Americans had to fight black-clad Hessians during the Revolutionary War. Is that why black has such an ingrained stigma?

All the more reason why Americans would be sensitive to projecting themselves as heavies. Unless, like Hitler’s Death Head division, we want to create a fearful impression. How about a name? Brown Shirts. Jack-Boots. Black Gloves.

Atrocity damage control

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AbirThis is 14-year old Abeer Qasim Hamza al-Janabi’s ID.
From Al-Mahmudiya. She is the young girl who was gang raped by five American servicemen who killed her family, and incinerated her body once they were done.
 
The press reported that she was an Iraqi Woman. When pressed, Army spokesmen admitted that her age might fall anywhere between 26 and 14. Abeer’s ID was already confirming her true age for the International Press. Even a week after the military admitted the rape victim’s age had been 14, American papers were still reporting the story as the rape of an Iraqi young woman.

Animal cruelty at the rodeo

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Cruelty
I just learned how they make horses and bulls jump up and down at the rodeo. I must admit I wondered why it was that the animals suddenly leaped about madly (bronc’d) after they got out of the gate and not before, and why did they stop once the rider was thrown?

It turns out there’s a strap that the other cowboys cinch around the animal’s testicles. They yank it tight as they open the gate. Then, once the rider is thrown, attendants chase the animal and release the cinch.

This is why animal rights groups protest the rodeo. Oh they may protest the general mistreatment of the animals, and the risk of injury to which the animals are routinely and senselessly subjected, but that strap around the reproductive organs cinches it.