OH THE IRONY. But Poe's Law probably governs in high schools too. For the same reason irony doesn't compute on social media: adolescent frontal lobes. I don't have much use for guns myself, but it's obvious to me that when the corporate media gets behind a public issue like gun control, it can't be in the people's interest. AT ALL. Since when have even Big Dems supported anything righteous? The news usually blacks out calls for social reform. Unless it's the common people you're asking to disempower, not corporate hegemony. Today the press is platforming the protests with live feeds and biographical highlights of the youthful petitioners. This is MANUFACTURED DISSENT. Nickelodeon suspended its television programming to accommodate, in essence, a protracted commercial break. A young person's choice to "walk out" from school today is not rebellion, it's conformity. To the astroturf. Get a load of the profiling of the Florida students, portrayed as movement organizers! Their role more resembles contestants for America's Got Talent: the Protest Edition. The #March14 school walkouts across the country only confirm the mendacious education our children are getting. Gee kids, when you graduate, to no job, no health care, no environmental protections, no economic rights, maybe even no home, AND a leveled playing field of NO PRIVILEGE for any of you, you kids are going to need guns.
Tag: America
A real democracy would elect Trump
A friend of mine used to say "You know who has their finger on the pulse of America? Walmart." Materialism on the cheap, zero social responsibility. It's true of American television, fast food, urban planning, everything USA. We sell immediate gratification, that's it. Success in America under declining capitalism has become courting only the lowest common denominator. I can wish it was otherwise, you can lecture it to death, but Cracker culture: insipid, racist, xenophobic culture is American culture. Love yourself, hate everybody who isn't you. For many successive Me-Generations, narcissism is WHAT MAKES AMERICA GREAT. The American mass doesn't want an Obama hued panel of multiculture-splainers saying America must be anything but stupid indulgent. An intelligencia's repulsion at Donald Trump and his common denominator campaign goes without saying, but it can't fault his sales pitch. Trump is tuned to win. Feel rueful about the lumpen masses, but you're being undemocratic.
When Michael Moore said snipers are cowards, he gave Americans a pass
Michael Moore criticized AMERICAN SNIPER for glamorizing snipers, because they are in essence cowards who shoot victims in the back. It hit home, no doubt because exploiting the unfair advantage, shooting people unseen, doesn't just apply to soldiers who carry sniper rifles. The act of targeting people who can't fight back is carried out by many more specialists than snipers. It applies to helicopter gunners, soldiers who shoot civilians, soldiers who use night vision goggles, drone operators, bomber pilots, and of course the entire Chair-Force and Navy, whose every shot is taken from afar. America's war machine is designed to target the lesser-abled. In the title AMERICAN SNIPER, I'm not sure the second word describes cowards more than the first.
Gun Control for weapons makers not users, for war mongers not hillbillies
I'm really not big on this call for gun control, mostly because it means to further restrict individual liberties, and especially because the outcry is a media induced hysteria of disreputable provenance, aimed at America's violence junkies instead of its dealers. Really? Is Going Postal the result of a citizenry not having laws enough to control itself? US prisons reflect a conflicting diagnosis. In tragic synchronicity with the Sandy Hook school shooting which prompted US public calls for gun control, a knife-wielding madman in China assailed twenty schoolchildren with no resulting fatalities, giving rise to perhaps the first time the non-Mongol West has ever thought it glimpsed greener pastures over the Great Wall. My takeaway from Bowling for Columbine was not "Gun Control Now!" but the toxic volatility of America's culture of fear-of-violence-mongering and its gun-ho idolatry. Michael Moore called for a stepping up to our responsibilities, not a surrender to dumbassedness. I hold our national arrested adolescence to be a character flaw of pioneer, frontier provincialism, an adaptation of the civilian contractor settlers conscripted for the Westward Expansion, shock troops of the Enlightenment which became the onslaught of industrial capitalism. Americans are hicks --we celebrate it-- who define our personal space with armed borders. For us it's bombs not education, simplistic fraternal evangelism over scientific sibling-hood, our pretended easy camaraderie really armed detente: trust but verify. Because of course, American frontierism, yet unable to see itself as invasive, from Columbus to Manila Bay, has been imperial for as long as "Yankee" has been a pejorative; Americans blissfully, Disneyfically unaware. America's gun problem isn't just domestic, it's export. For gun control I'd like to see a ban on production, not consumption. Unlike drugs whose source is organic, the manufacture of weapons is a centralized racket, easily constricted and regulated. The "Gun Show Loophole" is a stop gap for small fry; let's muzzle the beast itself. And if you think reining in the weapons industry is improbably Herculean, why-ever do you think now is the time for Hercules to dispense with his Second Amendment protection? Just because the Right to Bear Arms has come to exclude bazookas or drones, doesn't mean its intent was not to protect our democracy from authoritarianism. If anyone had construed the Second Amendment as a mere hunting license, Theodore Roosevelt's national parks would have been seen as encroachments on our revolution-conferred sovereign's right to poach. Are Americans thinking that democracy is lost because we can't have bazookas -- that the Second Amendment is inapplicable because the high courts adjudge the masses incapable of self-governance? The "well regulated militia" has surely gone the way of the Home Guard or Neighborhood Watch Committee, as our civic nature moved from social to anti, but it doesn't diminish the need to have minute-men insurgents to counter would-be tyrants. Obviously we're not talking about Minute Men privateers to whom police departments can outsource xenophobic vigilantism. If Occupy Wall Street proved anything, it lifted the fog on America's militarized police state. Public gun
Lance Armstrong setback for Team America, retroactive, so totally unfair
You can see why Lance Armstrong fans are upset. Even President Obama is satisfied not to look back, why should the sports-doping authority? Lance Armstrong beat their drug tests fair and square, what right have they to retest his blood and urine samples, based on the probable cause of mounting witness testimonies, and now that superior tests can detect his workarounds? IF Team America ever cheated, it was fair and square. All our ducks in a row. If US proof of Saddam Hussein's Weapons of Mass Destruction turned out to be fabricated, it was fabricated to the standards required by veracity tests of the time. No fair revisiting spilt lives. If Barack Obama took the USADA's lead, he could rid American politics of all the Neocon cheats who still dominate the airwaves today. If Obama wanted to get lying, cheating, or taking unfair advantage out of the system. But breaking the rules, international law for example, the disproportionate use of force being a cherished national specialty, is the American Way.
Newmont Mining- Denver’s major menace to world’s fresh water supply
Andean people protest against Newmont Mining's Conga gold project during a march near the Cortada lagoon at Peru's region of Cajamarca, November 24, 2011. Protests have continued including a national march for clean Water in Peru during February 2012. Newmont pollutes air and water at all its gold mines from Ghana to Peru to Nevada and other sites, too, polluting fresh water supplies and air with mercury. Newmont has its world HQ in the south Denver area right off the interstate as you drive in from Colorado Springs. Be sure and pay them a visit when in Denver, Africa, or South America... In fact, this coming Saturday, Occupy Denver On March 3, 2012 at 12:00pm, will gather at the Occupy camp across from the capitol building at Civic Center Park. There Occupy Denver will then rally in solidarity with the indigenous and poor peoples of Peru and the Americas against Newmont Mining and corporate greed. A march will proceed down the 16th Street Mall to the statue of Christopher Columbus. The country of Peru will have massive protests in Lima by the indigenous, workers, peasants, and poor people against exploitation by corporations. The rallies in Peru are focused on Newmont Mining’s exploitation of the Peruvian people and destruction of the environment. Newmont Mining Company is the fourth largest gold mining corporation in the world. Its international headquarters is here in Denver. Wherever its operations reach, Newmont poisons the land, the water and the people. Native peoples have been especially hard hit – in Peru, Ghana, Indonesia, and among the Western Shoshone Nation in Nevada.
Consider the Lilies
My friends are no doubt a scrappy bunch. It's no big surprise that guys like Jon and Adam and--holy shit--Skip, are pissed off and ready to burn a few barns down, so to speak. I don't think I need to look up a bunch of fancy references to convince anyone that things are dire, dire, dire. The college students I went hiking with yesterday afternoon will have to live what, like 20,0000 years to pay off the stupid shell-game debt they supposedly owe. Some guy on Adam's page was trying to convince me the whole business is thus because we never pay our bills. Bullshit. It's like this because a buncha paranoid Fascist clowns have set up a little magick trick to try and convince us they have some legitimate claim to all the cheese. THEY DO NOT!!! So there's a fight working alright, and I've been in it since I was a potential in my Granddad's genetic line. But I recently noticed--this is so weird--we're all fighting the wrong guy, and he is us. If we collapse our little bubble here in our little gob of the quantum foam, we're all screwed; not just us little guys. And we really do have enough guys to kick their Fascist asses on the way down. But guess what, we've all got it wrong! Like it or not we're all in this together. We're each and every one of us as fucked up as the Devil!!! Shit he may have been the only sane one all along--but now I'm just picking at scales. Sorry. Didn't meant to. Ahem. Point is some of us are fucked up differently than others. It doesn't matter. That crackhead? Fuck-ed. The cop beating him down? Fuck-ed. Dominique Kahn-Strauss? Fuck-ed. Who else? The Pope? Me? You? Yeah, you're starting to anticipate if not grok me. I'm a tool. Sometimes I'm also a dick and an asshole. That's another matter--I'm happy about being a tool. A while ago I came back to Colorado from a trip back to Cleveland for the great John Covert's 95th birthday party. The moment I returned to my adopted home town, every television set in the danged known Universe began to trumpet the imminent falling of the sky, talking heads of every political stripe and linguistic camp bewailing the unavoidable collapse of the American dollar and the entire foundation of all civilization along with it. I found myself with time on my hands, so I started tinkering with this blog as nothing more than an outlet for some frustrations, and a place to sling a bit of my ordinary schtick, mainly just at myself, assuming I'd be the only one reading. I played around on Facebook a little meaning nothing more than to hunt down a few friends from the distant past. That's what FB is for, right? A series of rapidly developing events took place and I soon found myself in the position I mean to describe right now, as best as I am able. I
FOX broadcasting at it again, Gullible Travails and A Modest Proposal
CW57, one of the local DumFox stations, aired an "infomercial" for a seminar, books and training videos on how to take advantage of the housing market crash, telling the Gullible that if they buy the properties ON CREDIT (even though they're targeting people who are already in bankruptcy and facing foreclosure) then sell them to rich real estate developers for tens of times what the houses are currently priced, financed on both transactions with an Adjustable Rate Mortgage by the same investment banks which wrote a blank rubber check for the last time this scam was perpetrated. Now, the paper they hung on us last time, it wasn't the primary cause of the Recession Massive Economic Collapse it was just (normally, as everybody knows, I avoid cliché like the plague, but I'm going out on a limb and doing it anyway) the straw that broke the camel's back. 30 straight years of unfunded Reaganomics, the collapse of the infrastructure, such as levies, bridges, roads, other privately owned public utilities, unfunded war-for-profit where those who made the profit from other people dying paid no taxes on the blood money, destruction of the unions, done at public expense and again for private profiteers, and the legalization of Predatory Capitalism and relaxing every rule set in place to correct These Same Causes during the Great Depression of the 1930s... provided both the rest of the burden that poor camel was carrying AND starved and beat the living Hell out of him so he was incapable of carrying the burden. Fox uses the standard disclaimer that "The views expressed in this broadcast do not reflect those of NewsCorp" what a bunch of lying pukes. Fox News has spent BILLIONS of dollars ranting that this type of unfunded speculative investment could not possibly have harmed the economy. Nor that the Corporations getting welfare subsidies AND huge tax breaks, would increase the budget and double-trouble it by their obscene tax breaks. Instead, they blame the 51% of the people who make less than $22,360 a year for a family of four and thus are at poverty level. Or below. Couldn't possibly be the multi-Trillion Dollar giveaways to the Rich. The cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has recently been estimated at 1.5 Terabucks, or, for those who no speak geek, trillion dollars. That would have to ignore the at least 5 Trillion paid out to private corporations to "rebuild" Iraq and completely dismiss all the money spent on Afghanistan. And the fact that before 1991 Iraq had the strongest economy and best infrastructure on the Arabian Peninsula, even more than the Subsidized (by us) Sovereign State of Israel. That they had more female graduates from universities per capita than anybody else on the Peninsula, that their literacy rate even now surpasses that of the United States, More female Doctors. And that they weren't allowed to use what money they had (which was considerable) to rebuild their country for more than a decade, based on the "They're Developing WMDs"
White American lunch
I had a white American lunch today. It sounds like stereotyping to say that, but it's true, I had the Friday special at a local luncheonette. Roasted white meat of turkey, on white bread, with mashed potatoes and whitish-yellow gravy. Nothing of color, or shading, except a one ounce plastic cup of cranberry sauce to make it red blooded. Now who else is going to eat that? Of course I want to joke that green would have been unpatriotic, but sadly it's more likely a price issue at poverty wages.
Americans upset by viral Single Ladies video don’t know their ass from TandA
You thought ours was an oversexed culture obsessed with youth, but the recent furor over a viral video shows Americans don't know their ass from their T & A. Obviously everyone is aghast about too-young dancers gyrating to Beyonce's SINGLE LADIES, but I think it says something hilarious about our ineptitude with sexuality. Like the mess of clueless philistines weighing in, I too am inexpert at what titillates about 7-year-olds, and it's not going to stop me either. Can we agree the Beyonce hit is lewd? I'm guessing her video was unremarkable, I recall the SNL spoof was camp, but what are Beyonce's lyrics except deliberately crass? You expect a performance of "Single Ladies" to transcend its theme? You're going to be offended regardless who is lip-syncing it. Putting aside whether your daughter belongs onstage participating, where have you been? This is dance. Call it Vulgar Nouveaux or Burlesque Outré, it dates to Madonna's mother's virginity. This is dance, all you Kansans, onstage and on screen. Flashdance had nothing on Broadway, American Gigolo hid the sex behind clothes. Beside the point. Young dancers aspiring to tomorrow's auditions want to learn what their role models are teaching. Children today love Spongebob, but they're watching South Park and Family Guy too. The only uncomfortable party in the room is you. I recently attended an elementary school talent show that included some dance-schooled troopers. Some of their precocious moves were admittedly out of place and some even off-putting, but it didn't stop parents from appreciating the talent and obvious dedicated effort. Our little tarts didn't come close, by the way, to the spirited Single Ladies performance, clearly well choreographed, taught, and executed. Was outraged America also so unsophisticated to notice that the now infamous video was a multiple camera production? This wasn't a family recording leaked by an indignant relative. It was a World of Dance competition where no one watching showed any shock at the performance. While I confess I'm still offended by the Jon-Benet pageant aesthetic, these costumes and the next Britney backup dancers did not surprise. What entertained me most were the comments threading from the now multiple postings of the video. The original post accumulated over two million views and had to be removed for reasons that are self-explanatory apparently. On account of poorly-spelled death threats, I imagine. Eventually you'll find observations defending the performance, but for the overwhelming part, everyone wants to weigh their indignation against the next, accuse the dancers' parents of child abuse and round up a posse to chase the pedophiles they're sure are lurking. What I find endearing about their best Sunday earnestness is that these commenters wouldn't know a stripper's pole from where they get their haircut. Even as internet porn is so pervasive, and we worry it has saturated our psyche, it turns out the prurient pretenders-- as hypocritical we know, as Republican congressmen-- know as much about erotica as a prudes. Even more entertaining is a certain tenor to their comments, part of a trend I'm horrified
Jealousy, envy, and the “natural superiority of Western Civilization”
First we need to define a few basic terms. Jealousy and Envy are often used interchangeably. They are not interchangeable. Jealousy is the notion that somebody else wants what you have, whether it's based in truth or in sick fear. Envy is the desire to possess something somebody else has. In America, most of the resolved homicides fall under those two motives, to the point that when a person is shot in his/her home, her/his spouse or lover is almost never immediately dismissed as a suspect. Envy takes the form of Avarice, Envy and Avarice are described theologically in the Seven Deadly Sins. Avarice leads to the taking of those things of which one is Envious. When that is done at gunpoint, it's called Robbery, and if one crosses the line between Armed Robbery and actually pulling the trigger, it's Capital Murder. What level of money would you wager that those charged with murder in the commission of a robbery are far more likely than those charged with murder of a "cheating" lover or spouse, to receive a Death Penalty or Life w/o Parole? Now, the Non-Western civilizations are accused of promoting Terrorism either through Jealousy or Envy of our "superiority"... but are we superior? One of the things that gets thrown around is the notion of Honor Killing. What, specifically, would be the biggest difference between killing your mate over alleged or actual adultery, and on the other hand, killing your mate over alleged or actual adultery? If you don't go all the way, don't kill, and merely beat your mate into a very dangerous medical condition in a "ritual" manner or if you do it in a non-ritual manner? Where is the difference? If a court system in one civilization condones by default, through lack of actual protections for the battered spouse, or a wink-wink nudge-nudge say-no-more Patriarchal lesser punishment for the Killer Spouse, How is it substantially different in a Religious Zealot society, like America, or another Religious Zealot society like Saudi Arabia, Iran, Afghanistan? Is the murdered or battered wife of a Christian in a Christian society more or less, better or worse, than the same scenario in another culture or faith? Mind you, the apologists for bombing the living Hell out of other countries often avoid using the Religious angle, they say instead the "christian oriented" Superior Culture of America v. the "muslim dominated savage infidels" in the Rest of the World. Much like the racist notion that one's RACE isn't the primary divider, it's the White Anglo Saxon Protestant CULTURE and Heritage that's superior to the just-by-a-coincidence Non-White, Non-English-nor-Pretestant cultures they're ummm... not necessarily putting down as Inferior, mind you, more like "The White Anglo Saxon CULTURE is ever so much better, you understand, we don't think you're necessarily not as good as us, we're just Better Than You." A slight warning here, when you go around saying you're that much better than others that you get to run their lives or oppress, repress and suppress them if they don't
American Corners: centers for organizing American government subversion
American Corners is a US government subversion program that operates multiple centers abroad to disrupt opposition to American foreign policy. See Conspiracy and Propaganda Centers: Illegal US Consulates in Venezuela. OK, one might think that this commentary about them exaggerates or is paranoid, or is misleading in some way, so let's examine one of these US government 'Corners' of subversion located in Israel. See American Corner Jericho. Here the effort to subvert is not directed against the Israeli government, but against the Palestinian opposition to that Jewish State dictatorship. The basic political program is- Accept our money and become corrupted by us. This is the policy everywhere they are in operation. It is the policy of dangling carrots in front of donkeys. Just how does American government subversion via the American Corner centers work? This American Corner Serbia is very illustrativ. Notice that the multi-national country of Yugoslavia has been completely ideologically deconstructed by the US government here. It is not called 'American Corner Yugoslavia', though this 'Corner' is located in Belgrade, but merely given the deconstructed name 'American Corner Serbia'. Notice too the cartoonish character of the site as it leads you finally to the nutty gritty of 'discussion' with... U.S. & SERBIAN MILITARY COOPERATION Colonel von Tersch U.S. Military Attache U.S. Embassy Belgrade There is talk of 7 American Corners located in 'Serbia'. The subversion level attacks at the level of the knees, to cripple and deconstruct the entire idea of a valid Yugoslavian nationhood. At the African Regional Services of the American Corner Paris program, we are told quite directly, among the Laura Bush 'Favorite Books' style literary display there, that ... 'Please note that no direct order from persons in charge of American Corners will be considered: To be valid, the order must be approved and sent by the U.S. Embassy Public Affairs Section.' So cute, and so direct to the point, too. The American Corners in Okinawa operates to keep the US military base ongoing at that site in Japan national territory. Not that the idea is very popular with the people of Okinawa itself. How about some of this American Happy Face at an America Corner in the Arab World? Surfin' U.S.A.! at MCBS On February 18, Embassy Muscat's Defense Attach Col. Mark Avery enthralled a full house of approximately 50 students at the American Corner at Modern College of Business and Science (MCBS) with tales of surfing in his home state of Hawaii. Explaining how surfing was originally permitted only for Hawaiian kings on huge boards cut from old-growth forests, the Colonel described the sport's modern manifestations. He discussed the surfing craze of the 1960s that spurred even American Midwesterners who lived hundreds of miles from ocean waves to buy surf boards, and he introduced surfing music like the "Beach Boys." The students especially enjoyed the Colonel's photographs of his favorite surfing spots in Oman, and appreciated his use
Doomed to repeat internment camps
Several miles north of Moab, Utah, on Highway 191, there's an Historical Interest marker to commemorate the Civilian Conservation Corps work camp at Dalton Wells. According to the plaque on the site, Camp DG-32 was used for public works through the Great Depression, and converted in 1943 into a concentration camp for Japanese Americans accused of being troublemakers at the civilian internment camps. The plaque offered an apology for the "total violation their civil rights," and this admonition: After which someone added in parentheses: "(Patriot Act, 2001)" and then as if to make the point, a next somebody scratched it out. Full text of the marker: Civilian Conservation Corps Camp DG-32 (Co. 234) 1935-1942 During the Great Depression of the 1930's, CCC Camps were scattered all over the USA. They provided gainful employment to youth of the nation with work on public service projects. Between 1933 and 1942, four camps were located near Moab. Each camp worked on various natural resource project for the Soil Conservation Service, the National Park Service, and the forerunner of the Bureau of Land Management. DG-32 was a long-lasting camp and typical of most with wooden, tar-paper covered barracks and buildings housing some 200 young men between the ages of 18 and 25. Enrollees came from the eastern states, and leadership was provided by the Army, Grazing Service, and local men experienced in construction and stock grazing needs. Under spartan conditions, clothing, food, and housing were provided in the primitive camp. Pay was $30 per month with $25 sent home. DG-32 projects included many range improvements: stock trails down the precipitous sandstone cliffs, spring developments, wells and stock ponds, eradication of rodents that competed with stock for feed, fences for corrals and pastures, reservoir dams, roads and bridges. These projects provided on the job training for the enrollees, besides the benefits they brought to the local economy. Many of these works are still in use today. The value of the camp and its works to Grand County is beyond estimation. It was a significant milestone that greatly influenced the economic history of the county. All that remains of the camp today are the cottonwood trees planted by the enrollees that you see fronting this site, concrete slabs for buildings, graveled roads and rock-outlined walkways, the remains of an old windmill and a rock masonry water storage tank. These remnants signify the moving history of a time when America valiantly struggled to restore its economic stability and provide its young people with meaningful employment. Japanese-American World War II Concentration Camp 1943 On January 11, 1943, a train pulled into Thompson Station north of here with armed Military Police guarding sixteen male American citizens of Japanese ancestry. While the locals of the town waited to cross the tracks, the entourage was loaded and transferred to the old abandoned "CCC" camp located here at Dalton Wells. Their crime? They were classified as "troublemakers" in the Manzanar, California Relocation Center where they and their families had been forcibly located at the start of World War II. Removed from their homes and lands
The White American NOBAMA dumb face
Did Obama's election mark a milestone against racism in America? In fact it's elevated a new flavor of bigotry that I can really get behind. I glared into a lot of faces arriving for Sarah Palin's last engagement in Colorado Springs. My disdain was unbridled, it's true, as I expressed my personal shame that they were the folk giving our town its wretched national reputation. Sarah Palin needed an audience of dumb-asses, so they sent her to dumb-ass central, Jesus Springs. But looking across those faces confirmed an observation that has been disturbing me for some time. There's a familiar similarity in their facial features. My "White American" title not-withstanding, this telltale feature transcends race, age, gender, and beauty. The trait is more than the unblinking glare of the born-again. I might have dismissed it to a haircut, or malnutrition, or fetal-alcohol syndrome, but clearly it's more pervasive. And it certainly grates against the American ethic that we are all created equal. It may be nothing new, that intelligence, or significant lack of it, is a perceptibly physical trait. But the occasion of an Obama sea change has let loose my sense that I've license to make fun of it. I feel confident to report to you that, compared to average, the Sarah Palin supporters stood out like, well, stupid people. They didn't need campaign buttons, it was written on their faces. Now I see it in photographs of the campaign rallies. Next to the Chicago crowd, the Tuesday Arizona audience looked like pellagra victims. It's a purely visual cue. Hearing their voices on video only confirms the book covers adroitly judged. This game might be well and good in the privacy of my own TV viewing, but what of my new impulse to have at these irritating sods? Will there be social therapy for this bigotry? What of my angry resentment that for so long these bastards held a poster child aloft as the American president, screwing all of us with his malevolent, immoral idiocy?