Monthly Archives: July 2007

US army blocks efforts to build Canadian protest against Bush

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The Council of Canadians has been blocked by the US army from building a public protest against a major summit to be held in Montebello, Quebec in August.
 
Bush and the Mexican ‘President’, Felipe Calderon, are two of the bigwigs that will be attending . This effort to seclude protest away from public view may foreshadow the types of violations of the right to protest and the right to free speech that will probably be put into effect during the Democratic and Republican Party conventions coming up next year? In the abstract we have the right to public protest which is a basic exercise of our supposed right to free speech, but in the concrete this is often violated in some form or another.

Harry Potter meets Laura Bush

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The role she was born to play.I wanted to hate Harry Potter’s latest movie but for one happy surprise: the villainous Dolores Umbridge, played not as a malignant Mimi Bobeck, but instead a spot-on incarnation of First Librarian/Educator guess who?! The First Lady played herself, a smiling headmistress pulling a no-child-left-behind clear-skies-initiative at Hogwarts to subvert the education process lest new skilled wizards graduate to jeopardize the duplicitous aims of the state ministry. With a saccharin plastic grimace and trademark twinkle in her eye, Ms Bush thwarted the young wizards’ magic lessons and exacted Kafka’s Penal Colony punishment on her unresisting subjects.

The unflinching First Lady caricature lent this Potter adventure a semblance of social commentary, but betrayed us thereafter, offering nothing else resembling Muggle/human nature or societal fabric to give a viewer insight into their own lives. Except maybe the ugly scarves at Christmas for comic relief. Otherwise Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix was pure entertainment at the cost of two hours of your imagination on idle, but I’ve read no more than a page of Potter, so what do I know?

I also really don’t know enough about Dungeons & Dragons or Tolkien to be able to judge the genre. Is it enough to appreciate J.K. Rowling’s fanciful parallel world like an elaborate puzzle or computer fractal marvel? It’s not my resistance to trivial minutia, it’s that all the clever pieces form an intricate lattice holding up nothing. This is my usual rant against videogame storytelling, always swimming upstream against currents of obstacles, pocketing clues. It’s myth-telling void of any wisdom, natural or historical, unless you count history as keeping a bread crumb trail of Harry’s info quests.

The forces of darkness and light in Harry Potter’s Tatooine lack for every dimension except on/off amplitude, even there without shades of grey. The characters’ actions are driven by neither sociobiology nor mortality. Only at the film’s close does our young Jedi/Chosen One offer an afterthought about team spirit to buoy his friends as they contemplate the battle with evil coming in the next installment: “Unlike Voldemort, we have something to fight for.”

Really? To my mind, anticipating that great evil fights for no reason misjudges its relentless zeal. The misdirection echoes the New World Order fear-mongering against Moslem Evildoers, terrorists apparently who act “because they hate us.”

Surely this underestimates the selfishness or desperation that makes the real world go ’round, motives neatly incomprehensible to young altruist minds. Real evil is an infinitely more ruthless force which preys already on the Harry Potter generation outside the theater doors. That evil is systemic, its motive is greed, and it perpetrates dehumanization. Also like the movie’s corporate makers, it employs misdirection just like Dolores Umbridge Bush to neutralize Harry and his friends.

That said, Imelda Staunton’s flawless turn as our Cretin-in-Chief’s cretinous better half was gloriously, fearlessly in-somebody’s-face.

Existential gamboge

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What do they mean by Existential war? Do you know? I don’t!
 
I don’t think the pundits know either. But how rather clever for Communications Majors to choose a word that all English-speakers recognize, yet nobody understands. Unlike Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction, Americans know existential exists, and its meaning is so deep that it has to mean something they don’t understand, like why we are in Iraq.

Isn’t this the same trick decorators use to aggrandize their color palate? They choose perfectly unnecessary interim shades of color close enough to the ones you’d recognize, leaving you just enough in the dark so you won’t say “eewww.” Gamboge for example, it’s a color yep, but it may as well be ecru or puce for all you know.

So what could existential mean to describe our endless war? Endless? Phony? Circumspect? Suspect? Existential is like Atomic Physics. There are those who understand it, but they can’t explain it to the rest of us because we don’t share their hat size. Shame on the TV talking heads who smile when they say existential, like they’re telling us something.

The insincerity reminds me of the spin alley pundits at the presidential debates, spinning a victory for Bush. They would praise the little moron only to the extent of saying, while smiling, that he was the right man for the job.

Does existential describe America’s war? Does it describe illegal? Or cowardly? I’m not sure, but I think it means gamboge.

It’s time to reform sex offender laws

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The National Security Police State needs many different demons to be seen struggling against. Their holy trilogy of Satanic opponents is Drug Users, Terrorists, and Pedophiles.

In all three cases, all due process and logic just gets totally thrown to the wind when police lodge accusations of this type against oftentimes quite common people. Right Wing Christian retribution becomes the only law of the land then, as political McCarthyism becomes criminal McCarthyism. See Call to Reform Sex Offender Laws Now and note that America’s greatest living historian, Howard Zinn, is one of the signatories.

The obscene IMF and Afghanistan

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How obscene is the IMF? How obscene is international capitalism? Pretty damn obscene and Afghanistan is just one case of why and how. The BBC has an absolutely idiotic report today called Afghanistan to Obtain Debt Relief.

What does this ‘debt relief’ consist of? Afghanistan will now have it’s payments on its $12 billion debt cut to 51% of what it is now! And this is called relief?????

Let’s see now? The US has fomented and funded war for 3 decades in this sad country and continues to do so. The US current specialty is in bombing Afghan villages from way up high and killing huge groups of civilians that might, or might not have, an armed man or two down below. A poppy is safer from NATO forces in Afghanistan than a civilian.

And the per capita income is far below that of $1,000 per person per year. Just how generous can the IMF be? Debt payments cut in half? Oh, whoopee! Bombs Away, IMF!

Resistance to gay marriage is inevitable

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Avenue Bistro on Nevada Avenue in downtown Colorado SpringsGay Pride kicked off this week at the Avenue Bistro on Nevada where a banner on the terrace reads GAY MARRIAGE IS INEVITABLE. May I just say, not to dampen the optimism, but what an unfortunate choice of a taunt.
 
Inevitable? Like death and taxes? Both are acknowledged certainties, but who relinquishes to either without a fight? Over my dead body would be my involuntary response, and I favor gay marriage. What kind of reaction does the gay movement expect to provoke from their detractors?

The decline and fall of Roman Empire was inevitable, as most certainly shall be ours. Is such the inevitability gay marriage advocates want to conjure? The association would be foremost on the Colorado Springs Fundamentalist mind I would guess. Don’t you see Sodom and Gomorrah haunting the imaginations of those resolved to protect the sanctity of marriage from the [sweaty] grasp of homosexuals? My biblical knowledge is limited, was there a sex act of preference in Gomorrah?

The new Bistro banner replaced a straggler from last year’s campaign, featuring the dog who mooed, a theme wisely euthanized (to injure the concept further). To my mind that poor dog was an incredibly ill advised analogy for diversity of sexual orientation. Accept him or not, celebrate him if you were so inclined, but a dog who said moo by definition was not natural.

Mass murder of civilians their only strategy left

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The US government war to control declining world oil supplies for itself is running into obstacle after obstacle. A foreign policy that ultimately has no real political aim other than pure theft, in the end always finds itself to resort principally to using pure violence.

Mass murder of civilians in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Lebanon, Pakistan has become the US government’s only strategy left. How ironic that a war that has had as its stated #1 goal a design to stop terrorism, has now absolutely devolved into having its #1 goal to simply do nothing more than spread terrorism to others, and therefore supposedly away from ourselves.

Repugnican win in 2008

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I predict a Republican win in 2008, sorry to say, with really little we can do about it unless we can silence the media forked tongues. This country is headed for an election in 2008 we the people can’t win, and it won’t take black box voting, purged voter registers, or harassment at the polls to do it. Rove’s crew, the corporate interests and the GOP are lining up opposition candidate(s) who can’t win.

Barack, Hillary. Give me a break. In 2004 we couldn’t get Joe public to vote in great enough number to remove our certifiable idiot in chief, and this time he’s going to vote for a black president? Americans are still not ready to give gay partners equal treatment under the law, do you mean to tell me they’re ready for a woman president?

And those of us who can scrape together a third party coalition, are we going to do any better than split the vote between the Democratic Party stooge and a third party hopeful? The corporate media will blame the former for defeatism in Iraq and lambaste the latter as unelectable. Unless the power can be pulled from the traitors-to-democracy at the microphones, the average American lout will cast his lot with the Republican mafia/mormon/moron don du jour.

Stealing daddy’s spotlight…and mommy’s pills

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Ready to be happy?
This morning, catching up on the goings-on after a week in blazing hot and muggy Mexico, I read on CNN.com that Al Gore III was arrested recently on charges of possessing — in addition to marijuana — Vicodin, Xanax, Valium and Adderall. Oh my! The article pointed out that prescription drug use is becoming more prevalent among the young than even good ol’ pot.

Prescription drug abuse is particularly common among upper middle class students, according to Lisa Jack, a clinical psychologist at Augsburg College in Minneapolis, Minnesota. “It just goes to show that where you’re from doesn’t matter,” Jack said. (I hope she isn’t speaking geographically).

The article goes on to admonish parents to lock our medicine chests so that vulnerable offspring will be adequately protected from evil.

Okay, done. But it seems to me that a better question would be, “Why are upper middle class bathrooms filled with an array of pretty-colored mood-altering pills in the first place?”

Welcome to the world of the upper middle class housewife. We take Adderall (basically speed) to get through the morning rush and the long list of daily chores. Valium (a tranquilizer) around 3 p.m. to take off the remaining Adderall edge and get through the afternoon kid activities with a smile. Xanax before stressed-out husband walks through the door assessing performance and demanding moral support and a lovely dinner.

After the kids are safely tucked in, Vicodin (an opioid) gives the same buzz as the 2 or 3 glasses of wine that we used to be able to handle easily, but which now lead to belly fat which, face it, is not only unsightly but downright unhealthy.

What the young ones apparently haven’t discovered yet is that Ambien at bedtime puts one into a nice dreamless coma that lasts until the alarm bell goes off and the cycle begins again.

I bet that you wish you could be-e-e half as lucky as me-e-e.

Posted by Marie Walden on July 08, 2007 at 01:44 PM

Uproot nuclear missiles in our backyard

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Uproot not upgrade nuclear missiles in our backyard
Vigil to commemorate Trinity atomic test blast, July 16, 1945
Nuclear SILO N-8, Weld County, 1pm Saturday, July 14, 2007
(CITIZENS FOR PEACE IN SPACE carpool starts at PPJPC at 9:30am)

From Bill Sulzman of Citizens for Peace In Space:
UPROOT, DON’T UPGRADE MISSILES IN OUR BACKYARD

The nuclear non proliferation treaty (1970) and the International Court of Justice opinion (1996) both call for the dismantling of all nuclear arsenals and the prevention of new nuclear weapons anywhere.

U.S. policy ignores both principles. Nuclear silo N-8 in Weld County should be uprooted not upgraded. Ranchers and farmers know the scourge that weeds represent. For good things to grow bad ones have to be eliminated and replaced. The 49 Minuteman III missiles in our state and the other 451 spread across parts of Wyoming, Nebraska, Montana and North Dakota are illegal, immoral and noxious for the whole world. They need to be eliminated to restore the integrity of our state and our country.

Join us on July 14 at Nuclear silo N-8 in Weld County, the site of the 2002 Sacred Earth and Space Plowshares action. Help us express our gratitude to Sisters Ardeth, Carol and Jackie and to Fr Carl Kabat who remains imprisoned for a similar action in North Dakota last year. We will also remember the Trinity atomic blast which occurred July 16, 1945.

The vigil at the silo will start at 1:00. We will leave in a carpool from the Justice and Peace Office, 214 E. Vermijo Colorado Springs at 9:30 AM on Saturday July 14. For more details call 389 0644. We will have maps for those who are driving.

US government breeds terrorism everywhere

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Our government is the #1 breeder of terrorism across the planet, same as it is the #1 world breeder of drug trafficking. The latest from Iraq is news of how a car bomb went off in a Kurdish market where people buy their food, with hundreds killed and wounded. Who did it? The short answer is that you and I did.

How so, you might ask? Simple. It’s because you and I mainly sat back and watched our government destroy a country, and then divide up the ruins between 3 principle groups; the Kurds, the Shia, and the Sunni. Then we sat back while our government set them against each other. We did next to nothing to stop this from happening, and we continue to do next to nothing as if it were not our responsibility to act.

OK, that’s the short and abstract answer to who set that bomb off. But who might have done it physically, and why? Most will turn their accusations to one of the groups being victimized by the US occupiers. But truth is, it could have been set off by many others, including the Turkish government and the US government itself. Can imagine the Turkish government, whose brutality to the Kurds is legendary, but not the US government? But why not?

The US government practices collective punishment daily in Iraq and Afghanistan. It so much as a bb gun goes off directed at US forces, the US levels entire neighborhoods. In Afghanistan, it’s just bombs away from a high. In Iraq itself, the reaction usually mimics more the Israeli style counter insurgencies against Palestinian communities. In both manners, the civilians take a big hit for any resistance activities that they may or may not have partially sanctioned i their neighborhood.

Back to the market bomb. What is there to make us think that the US military does not use these terrorist attacks as yet another tool in the manipulation of events to make their occupation of Iraq come off? They did this sort of thing constantly in Vietnam, as did the French in Algeria. In war, nobody can ever be too sure of who is responsible for what? What one can be sure of is that occupation breeds acts of terrorism, usually against others than those doing the occupying.

Message from the US government post 9/11? We are better at using terrorism than you can ever be, al qaeda.

‘Doctor’s Plot’ hysteria spreads to Australia

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Three weeks after 9/11, I called back to make a follow-up appointment with my dermatologist, an Arab doctor working in a Border community in Texas. It turns out that the local hospital had fired him, though they said that a family emergency had been the reason he was no longer available.

Perhaps, that’s why these ‘doctor’s plots’ seem like such old hat from my own personal perspective. One minute my doctor was there, and the next minute he was just disappeared. Nobody asked any questions.

Cut to the recent hysteria whipped up in Britain, where the anti-immigrant/anti-terrorist witch hunt now centers around Muslim doctors, and their supposed underground network to kill people. At best, the attempted bombings of 2 airports seem to hinge only on the actions of 2 doctors, one from Iraq and the other from Lebanon. The rest that were arrested are not even closely involved with these 2 events, though they are being held never the less. But how much confidence can be placed that even the 2 doctors mentioned above did anything illegal? Do we trusty the Military/ Homeland Security apparatus that much to believe that they are incapable of fabricating the whole event? After all, these are the people that think it their right to hold people without lawyers and trials, and torture them in secret prisons around the globe.

Now, this ‘doctor’s plot’ hysteria has spread to Australia, and it is only a short matter of time ’till it comes our way here in the USA. How gullible will our population be? I’m afraid that it is not a very reassuring scenario.

Impeach Me -go ahead I dare ya

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Remember this taunt? Knock my block off, (chip on my shoulder), Go ahead, I dare ya.
A Proclamation by the President of the United States of America

WHEREAS Lewis Libby was convicted in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia in the case United States v. Libby, Crim. No. 05-394 (RBW), for which a sentence of 30 months’ imprisonment, 2 years’ supervised release, a fine of $250,000, and a special assessment of $400 was imposed on June 22, 2007;

NOW, THEREFORE, I, GEORGE W. BUSH, President of the United States of America, pursuant to my powers under Article II, Section 2, of the Constitution, do hereby commute the prison terms imposed by the sentence upon the said Lewis Libby to expire immediately, leaving intact and in effect the two-year term of supervised release, with all its conditions, and all other components of the sentence.

IN WITNESS THEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this second day of July, in the year of our Lord two thousand and seven, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and thirty-first.

GEORGE W. BUSH

Hepatitis C and the US recipe for disaster

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How incompetent is the US medical system? Take a look at Hepatitis C to find out. Over 1,000,000 US prisoners have acquired it and most are unaware and not getting treatment for it. Meanwhile, prison and medical authorities sleep on. Let’s build some more prisons, how ’bout it? Prison’s deadliest inmate, hepatitis C, escaping

Seriously, Eric, about the bumper sticker

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Saying “At least Nixon had the decency to RESIGN”.

It sounds like a do-able proposition. Price them low enough to be affordable, but high enough to cover your costs and a profit margin. Even us hippies have to eat sometimes, and the landlord gets uptight when you don’t toss him some bread from time to time (at random intervals like every 30 days, 31 days, 28 days, that kind of random)

Also ask the ACLU people if the fact that none of the cops filed an Official Pig Report on St Paddy’s day, actually that day, about anybody hitting them at all ever, could invalidate the so called “evidence” offered by those bootlicking, suck-ass “good citizens” that it happened.

Support Unsere Truppen

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New World Waffen SS sticker
What does it mean to support the troops when they’re invading nations, detaining citizens and abusing prisoners in concentration camps? Are Americans going to be able to say they didn’t know about such concepts as sovereignty and due process under law? They were cheerleaders for it. Support the troops [who do it]! Sieg Heil!
 
In the Gunther Grass novel The Tin Drum, a civilian Nazi party member chokes on his party member pin trying to avoid recognition and retaliation at the hands of his Soviet partisan captor.
 
American dumbkofs will do better to peel those stickers off their cars now and beg their boys to get their asses home. Better than having to eat their warmongering words cum SUVs.

Feel Good Imperialism returns

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Now that Dubya is in free fall with all his toads, it’s time for Feel Good Imperialism to return. And who better to be the general for all the feel goody liberals that like imperialism with a smiley face, than Al Gore, Rock Star? Is this better than the New Life Church, or what? Gore plans to rock against warming, and you can bet there’s money to be made by all our newly ‘green’ corporations. I’m so excited for Mother!

US helicopter gunships threaten Pakistan mosque in siege

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The embattled US military puppet regime of Musharraf is using US made helicopter gunships to threaten continued attack on an Islamabad mosque where young students are holed up inside. What an image for the entire Muslim world to see.

This dictator Musharraf is setting himself for an exit in the same style as the Shah of Iran. This US backed attack on this major Pakistani mosque comes along with the mass US murders of Afghanistan civilians, the Pentagon’s use of collective punishment across Iraq, attacks on Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, the pardoning of the criminal, Scooter Libby, and in the days to come, the crumbling of Pakistan’s dictatorship. What next for the Bush Administration? Probably a joint US-Israeli bombing of Iran in the days ahead.

And which countries are truly into Jihad? It appears that it is the Christian and Jewish ones. Payback for the Iranian hostage crisis, too, and for Iran’s government having successfully defended their country against the US backed Saddam Hussein. This is an unholy alliance that wants to run the affairs of the entire Muslim world, and most especially that portion of it stretching from Iraq to Iran to Pakistan.

And what was the supposed main crime of this mosque not reported in the AFP article? It was leading a campaign against the abuse and torture of Musharraf’s political prisoners. It was for their campaign against Musharraf’s prostitution of Pakistan to the Bush Administration. For that, the mosque had to be taken out. But the net result, is that the US and its puppet are destabilizing the entire country of Pakistan, and YES, the entire region, too. The Muslim countries will eventually unite against the Bush led thugs when pushed too far. They don’t like US government terrorism. And neither should the American population.

High Schoolers confront Bush about his advocacy and use of torture

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Democracy Now had a great report yesterday of how some scholarly high school students handed Bush a letter condemning US government use of torture on Prisoners of War. All he did was repeat dumbly with the usual line that the US does not use torture on prisoners. He said it twice, too. What a clown. Until Bush and Cheney are in jail where they belong, this country is going nowhere quite fast.

The Doctor’s Plot revisited

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In 1953, Stalin launched his ‘defense’ against Jewish doctors he said were involved in a plot to kill him. Today, with Britain’s Labor Party now thoroughly discredited for being a poodle, barking alongside Bush always in support of the US occupation of Iraq, there comes another doctor’s plot.

A plot to show the world that TERROR is a really big deal to justify spending trillions of dollars on fighting against it. A plot led by a renegade religion! But this time it is the Muslims and not the Jews.

Jews are out (or is that in?) and Muslims are in (or is that out?) for ‘plots’ to be formed around. So we seem to have a Muslim doctors plot instead of Jewish doctors making headlines in the news. Go figure. There is another evil race, culture, and religion to justify wrapping oneself in the British and US flags with, like once Germans wrapped themselves in their flags under Hitler’s guidance. And like the Jewish doctors of the ’50s, these Muslim doctors of the present seem only capable of burning themselves alive with their nefarious manipulations. How convenient.

And what is it with airplanes and airports? Are we to believe that it is not our Homeland Security bureaucracy that has an obsession (to keep their cush ‘security’ jobs loafing around) with airports and flying, but Muslims? I don”t think so. They don;t have billions of dollars invested in running around in circles like our ‘security’ burrocrats and underlings do. They will attack in other ways than using airplanes to fly into buildings next time along.

I know some stupid doctors in this world, but to believe that Muslims docs are involved in running trucks filled with flammable liquids into airport areas is just too stupid to be believable. It is much more likely a ‘terror story’ to be spoon fed to stupid kids developed by cops. Don’t be a stupid kid, hear? The fetish for airports comes from ‘our’ side, not theirs. Green, Yellow, Red… it’s all baloney for the gullible. And the modern day version of the doctor’s plot is for the gullible, too. Tony Blair needs to be in jail, and his successor probably needs to follow him quite quick for this current campaign of fabricated bullshit. WOMD anybody?

The supposed Muslim doctors’ plot to kill us all seems to follow the same plot line that Stalin used to blame Jewish doctor’s for all the problems of the world, including a supposed effort to assassinate him. Paranoia, religous hatred, stupid us-first nationalism, and lots of lies make up the basic recipe for ‘doctors plots’. Oh, and today one must throw in a dash of airport, too.