International Animal Rights Day is December 10
Here’s the rest of your fur coat
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Monthly Archives: December 2007
Solitary confinement blocks for Ft Carson
Mark Lewis has been sent photographs taken by an alert Southeast Coloradan, of trucks laden with strange cargo for the Ft Carson PCMS. Strapped to each truck bed are several self contained units, of what appear to be modular living quarters, if your idea of a studio apartment is a single room, five foot by ten. On one end of each there’s a window in the form of a single narrow slit and at the other end a door with a similar window and a small utility door. If you were to imagine a place to conceal the Man in the Iron Mask in 21st Century prefab construction material, this would be it. The modular design looks like they’re made to fit into a honeycomb, reached by way of metal grates.
A recent executive order has cleared the way for military bases to house civilian detention facilities. I imagined barracks like the WWII internment camps. These accommodations look more suited to Guantanamo.
Illogical claptrap, I mean really
I am simply offended by the Non-violent Communications adherents who will pout in tearful defensiveness at the abruptness of a verbal confrontation. How dare they, really? Theirs is an attack, literally itself, a violence upon integrity. It is a classic fallacy of logic, the ad hominem attack, which criticizes the person making the argument as opposed to the argument itself.
It’s been my personal experience that NVC practitioners show themselves to be passive-aggressive enthusiasts, probably to end-run confrontations, which, while end-running, is inherently duplicitous. Do these methods not qualify as violent? I may speak in anger, but it is in earnest. And if I am able to make my point, the rationale for my anger may prove to be justified.
Here I am faced with three ignoble affronts against my person, where I’m accused of bandying only one.
No matter, how about we call it a draw, and get on with what we’re trying to say?
So-called truths and untruths
I’m absolutely delighted at the more and more prevalent use of the term “so-called” to condition certain previously unquestioned memes: the War on Terror is more and more being called the So-called War on Terror. The Surge is now become the So-called Surge.
Although it may suggest a generalized absence of attributable authority, akin perhaps to the “some-people-say” non-attribution, by definition “so-called” is more robust, it means doubtful or suspect. I hope it has been forever retired from casting doubt on global warming.
I can’t wait to hear it used to cut other false-isms to size: Bush’s so-called competence, Cheney’s so-called patriotism, Reagan’s so-called legacy, Fox’s so-called news, our so-called two-party system, and our so-called intelligence, to name a [so-called] few.
Bullfighting -is it fighting actually?
International Animal Rights Day is December 10.
Where are Salam Pax and Raed Jarrar?
The BBC has an update on Iraqi bloggers. Riverbend is back, she’s now a refugee in Syria. Nabil is in Jordan. “Zappy” is in the UK. 24stepstoliberty now writes from California.
Livesstrong and Najma are in Mosul. Last-of-Iraqis writes from Baghdad and shares the dashed-syntax with neurotic-iraqi-wife from the Green Zone.
September last year, Raed Jarrar, namesake of Where is Raed? was not permitted to board a JetBlue plane at JFK because he wore a t-shirt which read “We will not be silenced.” Salam al-Janabi, aka Salam Pax the Baghdad Blogger last posted to Fat Whiner on July 2006, and made a CNN video in April.
The US government wins the Venezuelan elections
Hugo Chavez went down in defeat in Sunday’s election in Venezuela. Like the Nicaraguan elections where the Sandinista’s lost power, the people of a Latin American country were once again defeated by the US government in an election. Why?
Today Nicaragua is the poorest country in the Americas with the exception of Haiti, which is presently occupied by a despicable United Nations military doing the dirty work of the Bush Administration. Why did the Venezuelan electorate vote the way they did then? The answer is simple, and the reasons are similar to why the Nicaraguans voted the way they did back in the ’80s.
Many Venezuelans, like the Nicaraguans before them, simply were scared that the US military would use their power against their Venezuelan ‘patria’ if the vote was against what the gringo Powers in D.C. wanted. They stayed home and abstained from voting in a very close election, handing the victory to the Venezuelan Business Class, though only by the slimmest majority.
This is the danger of holding elections where US money is allowed to enter in and determine the results of an election. US money buys elections in poorer countries especially when the threat is to go to war with that country if results are now what the US government wants. A government looking for revolutionary change simply cannot allow the US to channel money into its opposition.
The US government would imprison any opposition taking foreign money to try to overturn it, and that is what the Venezuelan government led by Hugo Chavez didn’t do, with the results being a setback for The Revolution there. Let’s hope that the setback is temporary only, for the Venezuelans under the control of their corporate power elites are going nowhere except into being controlled by the US elites from afar. Live free and independent, or die!
Free Professor Sami Al-Arian Now!
In the early morning hours of February 20th, 2003, armed FBI agents stormed a private apartment in Tampa, Florida. Family members stunned by fear watched the father, Sami Al-Arian – a university professor and civil rights activist, being handcuffed and taken away.
A dozen FBI agents searched the family’s apartment for 12 hours. Boxes of private papers, diaries, letters, books, photo albums, CD’s and VHS cassettes were confiscated. That night, US Attorney General John Ashcroft held a national press conference where he claimed to have caught the leader of a global terror cell. Free Professor Sami Al-Arian Now!
This case of Sami Al-Arian effects all of us around the US. The campaign to harass and fire Left Wing oriented professors on campuses around the US began with the attack on Sami Al-Arian and will not end until he is freed. Do we really want a country where only Right Wing zealots can hold academic posts? Do you want to be a student, or have your child be a student, where only dumb idiots can be teachers? Do you want an increasingly stupid America to be pushed by an already stupid and backward corporate-run government?
How will any world ecological problems ever be solved when only Right Wingers are in all key academic positions? What if all the professors of economics are total nitwits? What if history and political science positions are chosen only if approved by Right Wing assholes? We are headed in this direction now. Free Professor Sami Al-Arian Now!
Is there life after SaveDarfur?
Update: Retired UN ambassador Lakhdar Brahimi is interviewed on BBC the World: Elder statesmen seek Sudan progress.
If you can’t support the SAVE DARFUR call to arms, where does that leave you?
Is there no “grass roots” non-profit think-tank network supporting financial incentives to encourage benevolent stewardship on the part of the Sudanese government? (Maybe none flush with money.) Is there no one urging US and allies to quit arming those fighting the government forces so that China wouldn’t be called upon to resupply munitions to Khartoum?
That is whose fault?
Is there no congressional representative you can call to suggest legislation laying out diplomatic encouragement in lieu of divestiture and corporate maneuvers to snatch Sudan’s resources from the clutches of the Chinese?
That is whose fault?
Just because an alternative may be a little more complicated than can be explained beneath a compelling poster, is no excuse not to take the high road.
Just because your options are offered as the lesser of two evils: either approve UN peacekeepers or we will have to launch missile strikes, does not mean you have to choose either. Have you only Hillary or Obama to chose for presidential nominee? No you don’t. Would any other candidate stand a chance to be elected? Should you try and see?
Do not ask others to settle for your lack of imagination or stamina.
War decides who is left
I’m learning of a vulnerable schism among pacifists. There are pacifists like Gandhi and MLK, known as pragmatic pacifists, and principled pacifists emerged from the socialist school.
Pacifists up against the usual suspects need to ally, but their ideological differences are easily exploited by agents who would divide their efforts. One side has Jesus and a belief somewhat parallel to the one which dictates that none can be right except through Him. The other carries the baggage that religion has always messed up common man’s self determination, but beggars can’t be choosers.
The end of America here come the thugs
Naomi Wolf is touring the country to promote her bestselling horror book THE END OF AMERICA. In it she directs our attention to ten steps which have foreshadowed every open society’s descent to totalitarian rule. Rather than signs of nascent machinations, these form more of an inviolate blueprint. Recognize ALL of them?
1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy
2. Create a gulag
3. Develop a thug caste
4. Set up an internal surveillance system
5. Harass citizens’ groups
6. Engage in arbitrary detention and release
7. Target key individuals
8. Control the press
9. Dissent equals treason
10. Suspend the rule of law
Now we can see the checklist, applied by such would-be dictators like Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Pinochet, etc. Every last one being implemented, under development, or next up in the USA.
I would always have had a hard time imagining Brownshirts in America, because I imagined the thug class to be made of thugs. Imagine however the American incarnation, an under-educated, highly-patriotic, methodological enforcer of the law, except imagine the law as perverted, inconsistent, irrational, counter intuitive to what citizens expect to be their protections. Not so bright agents of arbitrary rules. It’s all there, and we’re already seeing the signs, police killing subjects with non-leathal weapons, using excessive force, enforcing laws that are contradictions of contradictions of constitutional protections. That’s thuggery. That’s terror.
Is Otis misshapen by BGH or steroids?
I’m not sure that’s an udder fastened like a diaphragm over the groin of computer animation’s favorite self-effacing alpha bull. While some may speculate that Back to the Barnyard is trying to normalize hermaphrodites in macho garb, a rugged outdoor transvestite perhaps like Eddie Izzard’s mannish executive transvestite. I rather think those are fat man boobs channeled from the King of Queens which come of human absorption of BGH, Bovine Growth Hormone, used for dairy cows, and I guess, our man cow Otis.
Not really. I think the rubber contraption is actually capping what would otherwise be prominent on a barnyard bull. And thus it is front and center, pink, thrust forward, often conspicuous by being just outside the frame, and what is it? A nubbly flesh colored bit of nothing. Otis, despite his gruff voice, is a eunuch, front and center, like Family Guy, Homer, Fred Flintstone and all of the South Park parents. Emasculated fathers, fatherhood figures without authority, least of all ownership, and with nothing on the fake masculine stereotypes of Hollywood and armed services commercials.
Shock doctrine rise of disaster capitalism
Naomi Klein, author of No Logo and The Take, set in Argentina’s deliberately crashed economy, has now written Shock Doctrine- the Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Very difficult viewing.
The War in Iraq
In my opinion, noted chronicler Ken Burns, whom I otherwise respect, does Americans a great disservice to title his multimedia WWII homage THE WAR.
I do resent the President and his enablers admonishing Americans for what may or may not be appropriate behavior “in a time of war.” We were not “at war” during the Cold War or the War on Drugs. And the War on Terror is equally an [existential, so-called] abstraction. Fighting terrorists, including the invasion of Afghanistan, is a police action. If we are talking about apprehension. Missile strikes are extra-judicial assassination. Undeclared military aggression.
But since our soldiers are being sent to war, and there is profound anti-war revulsion, and congress is being asked to collude by providing war funding, and we are detaining combatants which at a minimum should be awarded Prisoner of War status, we cannot escape discussing Iraq as a war, and most notably as an illegal war.
So when Ken Burns calls his WWII tome THE WAR, isn’t it more than slightly dismissive of veterans of all combat since? The Vietnam War lasted three times as long as WWII, to Baby Boomers it was the war. The Korean War, termed a “conflict” to avoid having Congress refuse a declaration of war, is now called the Korean War, even tragically the Forgotten War. World War One before it was The First World War, was known as The Great War, even the War to End All Wars. De facto it WAS THE WAR, but imagine anyone thinking to call it that in the midst of WWII.
Does Burns mean to deny [The] Iraq [War] its significance, even as he might suggest it lacks the legitimacy of WWII, the Just War? As Iraq casualties and atrocities slip from the headlines, it’s hard to see the diversion of WWII nostalgia as helpful.
Iraq may turn out to be simply the opening salvo of THE WAR declared by the corporate west on all of humanity. It deserves its due.
On not inciting a lynch mob
Do you know about the atrocities being committed in Darfur? Is the extent of your reaction being weighed as evidence about how much you know (ie. not enough)? If you are not calling for UN peacekeeper intervention, does it mean you have not exposed yourself sufficiently to the suffering of the Sudanese?
This would appear to be the logic of those advocating action/intervention. Surely you are a heartless do-nothing if you are not urging the tugging of every heartstring until a collective decision can prompt swift action. Cool heads might not prevail against a revenge-driven mob mentality, but why split hairs, they are hairs on the necks of Arabs.
When agitators urge action, if even they caution it to be non-violent action, the challenging endeavor of creating non-violent dialog and diplomacy can easily appear to stagnate in the “inaction” category.
The bigger picture about Sudan is that Europe and the US now face an eastern power vying for Africa’s remaining resources. To continue to dominate Africa, they have to mobilize opinion to favor a reversal of what has been a de-colonization consensus granting indigenous peoples their regional autonomy. To this end, grassroots activist mechanisms are being co-opted to manufacture public consent for re-shouldering the white man’s burden. A critical distinction for those concerned for the Sudanese is that western intervention is not the only solution. TO SAY NO TO MILITARY INTERVENTION IS NOT TO ADVOCATE DOING NOTHING. It is fine to raise awareness about the suffering in Darfur but maybe not if the common denominator response is an agitated public crying for blood.
You’d be the odd man out, trying to talk a lynch mob out of meting out justice to the Jesse James Gang. Where would you stand as you saw tempers becoming raised in response to heightened emotional manipulation? No one wants to deny the crimes committed, but what of the mechanisms of a civil society meant to preempt our baser compulsion to vigilante justice?
What if as well, the James Gang members the crowd was after were only the small fry? What if incredibly, the chief mob rouser was Jesse James himself? Perhaps even Jesse James would not have such gall, he would have to work through deputies like think-tank and media mouthpieces, or more insidiously through funding-starved non-profits, and tragically through unknowing surrogates with the best of intentions.
Ideologically it shouldn’t make a difference who is behind justice or before it. No one should be victim to a mob’s wrath. That’s not the point. What if you were working the crowd, trying to build an awareness that the Jesse James Gang was in their midst wreaking disaster of unfathomable consequence? Meanwhile the attention of that populace was being diverted to a humanitarian crisis which was in fact entirely a symptom and not a cause.
The Darfur crisis, begun in 2003, far from being ignored by our media, has successfully been used to obscure the million people killed by the US in Iraq, and the Israeli incursions into Lebanon and Palestine, both of which have been labeled genocides. Neither the ethnic cleansing in Lebanon nor in Palestine have drawn criticism from the lobbyists behind Save Darfur or the Genocide Intervention Network. What outlaws!